The e-government readiness index is comprised of web measure index, telecommunication index and human capital index.
The e-participation index measures the willingness and ability of a state to provide relevant information and quality services and to engage citizens in a dialogue in the process of service delivery and public policy making through the Internet. In the web measure index, a component of the e-government readiness, the United States topped the list of countries. The Philippines was ranked seventh, ahead of Singapore which was ranked number eight.
In the e-participation index, the Philippines was ranked the highest in Southeast Asia and sixth among the top 20 countries.
The Philippines was ranked fourth in the South and Eastern Asia region, behind Singapore, Korea and Japan but ahead of Malaysia, Brunei, Thailand, Indonesia and China in the e-government readiness index.
In some of the components of the e-government readiness index, the Philippines landed in the top 10. In the web index, the Philippines was ranked number seven worldwide and sixth in e-participation index.
The UN survey also noted that the Philippines together with Chile, Mexico, Singapore, Estonia, Argentina, Brazil, Korea, Malta and Turkey have made much faster and more effective progress in their e-government programs than some of the industrialized countries.
The high ranking of the Philippines in the UN survey was based on a quantitative five-stage model where countries are scored on the basis of the level of maturity or sophistication of web presence.
The Philippines was rated well on the web index because the government specifically targeted 100 percent web presence of the UN survey as a way of complying with the directive of the e-commerce law.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) has also ranked the country 49th out of 102 countries in terms of government online presence and 20th in terms of government online services based on the sophistication of delivery.
The Philippines was one of the eight middle-income countries that qualified in the Stage 3 or transaction stage in the WEF’s survey of national government websites.
It was noted that the Philippines was ranked sixth in the UN’s e-participation index. The components of this index are e-information, e-consultation, and e-decision making.
In e-information, government websites offer to citizens, policies and program documents, budgets, laws and regulations, and briefs on key issues of public interest.
In e-consultation, government websites offer a choice of public policy topics for online discussions with real-time and archived access to audios and videos of public meetings, while e-decision making provides citizen input into decision-making and actual feedback on the outcome of specific issues.
Autor: Edu H. Lopez
Quelle: The Manila Bulletin, 03.09.2004
