Could E-government Development Contribute to Reduce Corruption Globally?

Abstract

This paper analyzes the UN’s e-government development index (EGDI) [1] and the International Transparency (IT)’s corruption perception index (CPI) [2], globally. It will be identified weather or not a Pearson “r” correlation [3] exist between the two indexes mentioned. It aims to make a global comparative analysis on the evolution of world countries’ e-government’s index to showcase the results and compare them with their corruption perception index. The years analyzed are 2003, 2004, 2005, 2008, 2010. 2012, 2014 and 2016. Also, by analyzing such a considerable number of countries, it was deemed important and practical to divide the countries into groups of quartiles of similar e-government development level: Q1, Q2, Q3 y Q4 to allow a fair comparation among pairs of similar level of development. Our findings show that a high positive annual correlation does exist, and the respective conclusions and recommendations are drawn from the findings. They showed a world correlation average of 0.79 (high correlation) between the EGDI and CPI indexes studied, therefore it would stand to reason that e-government development does indeed contribute to the reduction of corruption.