East Asia: E-Government

Abstract

East Asian countries have different government systems, with diverse political and economic backgrounds. Yet, they all share the strong interest in the e-government that can deliver public services using information technology. Since 1990s, China has acknowledged the e-government as a useful tool to facilitate national economic development and carried out several projects, such as the Government Online Project. However, China's e-government still has a long way ahead to deliver better services to citizens, to allow its citizens’ participation in the policy-making process, and to open government data available to the general public. On the other hand, in spite of political instability and economic recession in the 1990s, Japanese e-government gained a great momentum after the year 2000, to improve the efficiency and transparency of the administration. The Republic of Korea (South Korea) started its e-government initiatives from automating the internal process of ministries and agencies in the 1980s and then evolved to integrating and linking their services and databases in the 2000s. Korean government has in particular valued the people's participation in the policy-making process. The UN E-government Survey in the 2010s, published biannually, shows that Korea and Japan have kept their firm positions as global leaders in e-government, but China has not.