Europe

• Author: G. Arévalo Nieto/E. Fernández Vicente/J.A. Messía de la Cerda Ballesteros/J.A. Rubio Blanco
• Pages: 21-122

21

2.- Europe

We describe here our key findings concerning assessment of e-government, e-

participation and data protection with respect to the 25 EU countries. The data

comes mainly from UN reports, with some improvements coming from

Eurostat databases, as explained above.

2.1. e-Government and e-Participation

Assessment

Web Measure Index

In order to analyze the web presence of the EU 25 countries we have

gone through their websites, and assessed the five parameters explained above.

Nevertheless, and due to the difficulty in obtaining a final scoring for them,

based on the different administrative systems, we decided to conduct the

quantitative analysis based on the data supplied by the UN e-Government

Readiness Report 2004.

If we go through these figures we can observe the following EU 25

ranking:

Rank Country WM

Index

1United Kingdom 0.973

2Denmark 0.934

3Finland 0.807

4Germany 0.795

5Sweden 0.772

6Belgium 0.772

7Malta 0.737

8Netherlands 0.718

22

9Estonia 0.699

10 Austria 0.699

11 Ireland 0.656

12 Poland 0.579

13 Italy 0.552

14 Czech Republic 0.548

15 France 0.541

16 Hungary 0.537

17 Slovenia 0.514

18 Slovakia 0.490

19 Lithuania 0.432

20 Luxembourg 0.429

21 Greece 0.409

22 Portugal 0.394

23 Spain 0.390

24 Latvia 0.390

25 Cyprus 0.236

The top-ten EU countries that we can find are the ones with values

almost over 0.700. This group is headed by the UK, and is mainly made up of

Northern and Central European countries. The presence in this group of two

new member states, Malta and Estonia, must be highlighted.

A second group of eleven countries is the one formed by those with

values within the 0.698-0.400 band. This group consists of six new member

states, three southern Mediterranean countries. Also there are Ireland and

Luxembourg.

The third group is formed by the four EU 25 countries with values

below 0.400. Here we can find two southern-European countries, Spain and

Portugal, and two new member states, Latvia and Cyprus.

23

Telecommunications Infrastructure Index

Using the methodology already described, and concentrating only on

European data, we have built the following ranked table for the European

countries:

Rank Country TV

Index

PC

Index

Tel.

lines

Index

Portable

Tels

Index

On

Line

Index

Internet

Access

Index

TCI

Index

1 Sweden

0.64 0.97 0.88 0.80 1.00 1.00 0.915

2 Denmark

1.00 1.00 0.84 0.72 0.78 0.80 0.855

3 Netherlands

0.59 0.71 0.69 0.55 0.77 0.92 0.732

4 Luxembourg 0.68 0.88 1.00 1.00 0.31 0.62 0.730