Co-authored with Long, Y.
As governments at different levels all around the world are increasingly using the Web to enhance and improve their services, understanding e-government development and exploring factors that affect e-government development have become important research topics. The purpose of this research is to investigate factors influencing e-government development in terms of social development lenses. Based on growth and regional development theories, the paper hypothesizes that income level, development status, and region are three factors that differentiate countries on e-government development. Group comparison tests are conducted using secondary data from the United Nations and the United Nations Development Programme. The results support the hypotheses that significant differences in e-government development exist between countries with respect to the three categorical variables mentioned above. In addition, the paper applies planned post-hoc tests to further investigate the differences. The results of this research are valuable to e-government scholars and practitioners. As the research involves data from over a hundred countries, it also contributes to understanding e-government development factors on a global scale.
