COMPARISON OF GROWTH OF THE E-GOVERNMENT INDEX IN THE BALKAN REGION
COMPARISON OF GROWTH OF THE E-GOVERNMENT INDEX IN THE BALKAN REGION

Summary/Abstract: The development and application of e-Government for the needs of citizens, businesses and other digital services is much needed today. Improving the telecommunications infrastructure, increasing online services and creating human resources in the use of information technologies have created conditions for mass application of e-Government. Today we can talk about e-Learning, e-Health, e-Judiciary, e-Security, e-Administration, e-Business, e-Elections, etc. The development of e-Government is different in different countries of the world. This development can be measured by the situation on the ground. An opportunity to measure the rate of development of e-Government in different countries around the world is based on the so-called e-Government Development Index (EGDI). Mathematically the e-Government Development Index (EGDI) is 1/3 of the sum of the values of the three parameters which are: the online services index (OSI), the telecommunications infrastructure index (TII) and the human capital index (HCI). These indices are produced independently for each country separately and in this paper data from the United Nations are used which are taken from the field every two years and reports are published. The rapid dynamics of technological development in the fields of ITC creates development conditions in e-Government as well. This affects different countries and regions for the e-Government Development Index to be permanently increasing because it increases performance in infrastructure (TII) and online services (OSI) as well as human resources (HCI). The purpose of the study is to compare the level of application of e-Government in several Balkan countries including the following countries: Albania, Greece, northern Macedonia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. For this purpose, carefully selected data from eight e-Government survey reports conducted by the United Nations every 2 years in the period from 2004 to 2018 are used. Based on these data, an analysis of the trend of increasing e-government application and a descriptive comparison between these states. The basic element is the e-Government Development Index (EGDI). The comparison and description of the upward trend is done for three constituent indices of EDGI and then a comparison is made between countries, the average e-government development index at the global level and regional level. From the data for comparison can be concluded that the constituent indices of EGDI in the countries of this region have had a constant increase. With the outbreak of COVID-19 a significant increase in the application of the Online Services Index (OSI) is expected due to isolation circumstances.

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