E-Government as an Efficient Tool towards Good Governance (Trends and Comparative Analysis throughout Worldwide Regions and within West Balkan Countries)

Abstract

In the new period of worldwide technological improvements, the public sector has been widely implementing the modern information and communication technologies in everyday work.. The broader use of ICT tools is leading to transformational shifts in public policy, processes and functions. E-government is engaged not only in providing citizen services but in improveing public sector efficiency, transparency and accountability in government functions and decreasing the costs of public administration.

In fact, the ultimate goal of the E-Government is to be able to offer the public services to citizens in an efficient and cost effective manner, which is also the good governance maxim.

Therefore, e-government can be seen as an efficient tool for good governance in many countries in the world, which are working on public administration reform, trying to make government more proactive, efficient, transparent and especially more service oriented. To accomplish this transformation, governments are introducing innovations in their organisational structure, practices, and procedures, including the way they utilise human, financial and information and technological resources to improve service delivery to citizens.

This paper presents the trends and makes comparative analysis of E-government development as an efficient tool to improve governance within the countries, especially emphasizing the E-government developments in West Balkans countries, comparing their achievements with the same in other worldwide regions and developed EU countries. Analysing the data from official UN and Word Bank’s Reports in the period 2005-2012 the objective of the paper is to indentify correlation between Good governance and E-governance development

Key Words: e-governance, e-government, good governance,