Determinants of e-government adoption : an empirical investigation in the Kurdistan region of Iraq

Abstract

Governments worldwide are increasingly becoming aware of the benefits of using the Internet to provide public services to their citizens. This phenomenon, referred to as electronic government (e-government),is said to generate substantial benefits such as accountability, transparency, convenience, cost saving, efficiency to both the government and citizens alike. However, despite the increase in e-government investments globally, low level citizens’ adoption of these services has been identified as a serious impediment to their success in both developed and developing countries. Researchers in various countries have tried to understand citizens’ perception towards e-government services, and to identify the factors that encourage citizens to adopt e-government services. Despite the existence of several studies, no such study has yet been conducted in the Kurdistan region of Iraq where government has planned to implement e-government in the region. Thus, the current study was the first to explore Kurdish citizens’ behavioural intentions towards e-government services to provide government authorities with information that could assist them to increase citizen acceptance of e-government services in the region. In addition to its practical significance, this study seeks to make theoretical and methodological contributions to the existing e-government literature. The current study distinguished between intention to use e-government for accessing information and intention to use e-government for conducting transactions, and separate models were developed for each comprised of several variables adapted from the technology adoption and e-government adoption literature. This distinction is lacking in the majority of e-government studies despite the empirical evidence that these two services are different in that transactional e-government is considered to be more complicated and more risky since it requires users to provide personal and financial information to government agencies. Consequently, empirical evidence shows that citizens are more likely to use e-government for obtaining information rather than conducting transactions. Therefore, it is both practically and theoretically important to distinguish between these two types of e-government services. This study also improves on the statistical approach used in other studies, employing a more robust approach in order to more accurately identify the relationships between the research variables prior to testing them. The data were collected through a survey questionnaire administered by the researcher to two groups of participants; undergraduate university students and non-academic staff at the University of Salahaddin in Erbil. The data were analysed using multiple logistic regressions in SPSS and path analysis in AMOS19. The results revealed that all the variables that were hypothesized in this study to be associated with the intention to use e-government services were indeed associated with the intention to use. For some the association was direct and for some it was only indirect through their relationship with other independent variables. The results also revealed that the strength of the association for those variables that were tested on both informational and transactional e-government on the intention to use was more significant for transactional e-government. This supported the argument that informational and transactional e-government should be distinguished when investigating citizens’ e-government adoption behaviour for both theoretical and practical purposes. Finally, the hypothesized relationship between the intention to use informational e-government with the intention to use transactional e-government was confirmed. This suggested that, higher intentions to use government websites to seek information are associated with higher intentions to use government websites to transact with government.

Date of Award	2013
Original language	English