Assessing web services of emerging economies in an Eastern country - Taiwan's e-government

Abstract Accessibility of much country-level information and many web services, originating from governments are a global standard. The governments of emerging economies in the eastern countries especially need to adopt, without undue delay, the advanced technologies for providing better web services to their citizens. However, consideration and evaluation of the effectiveness and efficiency of governments' web services is currently lacking in previous literature. Thus, this study first adopts a computational approach suggested in the literature to measure the effectiveness of Taiwan's established, city- and county-level (25 cities and counties, and 1411 governmental units) governments' websites. Then, by considering the IT-related input and output resources as suggested by the experts of e-government during several in-depth interviews, data envelopment analysis (DEA) evaluates the efficiency of Taiwan's governmental web services. This study reveals that the well-developed web services provided by Taiwan's government are apparent in two geographically dispersed cities (north and south) and one county in the northern region of Taiwan. In addition, six cities and counties appear to be ineffective and inefficient in providing web services to Taiwan's citizens due to their geographical remoteness from the capital and small regional populations. An additional finding confirms the significant effect of population size on Taiwanese services for e-government in each city and county. Finally, this study suggests applying more attention to website designs for different levels or regions of governments and building alternative communication channels for citizens with different backgrounds. Consequently, providing citizens' most-requested services becomes easier, and the resources' distribution becomes effective and efficient for those in different geographical locations. This study's findings represent a reference for providing better electronic publically accessible services, and a benchmark for scholars conducting further research in this area.