E-government in the Middle East and North Africa: The Role of International Organizations in the Experience of Egypt and Morocco
The underperformance of the Middle East and North African (MENA) countries to achieve reasonable levels of social and economic growth has put their governments under increasing pressure to reform their public institutions and increase their efficiency and effectiveness in delivering public goods. As these countries are still lagging behind most developing countries in socio-economic development terms and their governments have yet failed to fulfil the expectations of their citizens, a number of solutions are sought to enable the majority of the population to benefit from the advantages of the modernization process. Focusing on E-government policies as instrumental to good governance, we argue that policies that have been successful in a particular context may not apply in a different one and that policy makers must take into account local peculiarities in order to identify relevant good practices. We suggest that policy relevance can be assessed by jointly considering cultural proximity as defined by Hofstede and socio-economic comparability on the basis of selected indicators. This is empirically tested through an examination of the Egovernment policies in Egypt and Morocco that are benchmarked against the e-government value chain and then their reciprocal relevance is evaluated. We also assess the viability and success of these policies in light of the role that international organizations can play in supporting the efforts to modernize public administration in the MENA region and concludes that these organizations should be active at different e-government levels: providing an interoperability framework at international level, supporting the identification of relevant good practices at national level and being directly involved in their implementation at local level.
MENA countries E-government International organizations Business facilitation
Ashraf Mishrif Sandra Selmanovic
Middle East & Mediterranean Studies, Kings College London, London, WC2R 2LS. Ashcroft International Business School, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, CB1 1PT.
国际会议
2010 International Conference on Public Administration(6th)(2010 第六届公共管理国际会议)
澳大利亚堪培拉
英文
905-926
2010-10-22（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）