The E-Government Development Index presents the state of E-Government Development of the United Nations Member States. Along with an assessment of the website development patterns in a country, the E-Government Development index incorporates the access characteristics, such as the infrastructure and educational levels, to reflect how a country is using information technologies to promote access and inclusion of its people. The EGDI is a composite measure of three important dimensions of e-government, namely: provision of online services, telecommunication connectivity and human capacity.

The EGDI is not designed to capture e-government development in an absolute sense; rather, it aims to give a performance rating of national governments relative to one another.

Methodology

The EGDI is based on a comprehensive Survey of the online presence of all 193 United Nations Member States, which assesses national websites and how e-government policies and strategies are applied in general and in specific sectors for delivery of essential services. The assessment rates the e-government performance of countries relative to one another as opposed to being an absolute measurement. The results are tabulated and combined with a set of indicators embodying a country's capacity to participate in the information society, without which e-government development efforts are of limited immediate use.

Although the basic model has remained consistent, the precise meaning of these values varies from one edition of the Survey to the next as understanding of the potential of e-government changes and the underlying technology evolves. This is an important distinction because it also implies that it is a comparative framework that seeks to encompass various approaches that may evolve over time instead of advocating a linear path with an absolute goal.

Mathematically, the EGDI is a weighted average of three normalized scores on three most important dimensions of e-government, namely: (1) scope and quality of online services (Online Service Index, OSI), (2) development status of telecommunication infrastructure (Telecommunication Infrastructure Index, TII), and (3) inherent human capital (Human Capital Index, HCI). Each of these indices is a composite measure that can be extracted and analysed independently.

Prior to the normalization of the three component indicators, the Z-score standardization procedure is implemented for each component indicator to ensure that the overall EGDI is equally decided by the three component indexes, i.e. each component index presents comparable variance subsequent to the Z-score standardization. In the absence of the Z-score standardization treatment, the EGDI would mainly depend on the component index with the greatest dispersion.

After the Z-score standardization, the arithmetic average sum becomes a good statistical indicator, where “equal weights” truly means “equal importance.”

For standard Z-score calculation of each component indicator:

where:

x is a raw score to be standardized;

µ is the mean of the population;

σ is the standard deviation of the population.

Within 0 to 1 range of EGDI values the countries are then grouped into four levels mathematically defined as follows: very high EGDI values range from 0.75 to 1.00 inclusive, high EGDI group values range from 0.50 to 0.7499 inclusive, middle EGDI values range from 0.25 to 0.4999 inclusive, and low EGDI values range from 0.0 to 0.2499 inclusive. In all references to these ranges in text and graphic elements, the respective values are rounded for clarity and are expressed as follows: 0.75 to 1.00, 0.50 to 0.75, 0.25 to 0.50, and 0.00 to 0.25. To gain better insight into the situation of subgroups of countries with similar levels of performance within their respective EGDI groups, each EGDI group is further divided into four equally defined intervals, or quartiles1 . The rating class breakdowns within the respective EGDI groups, in descending order, are as follows: VH, V3, V2 and V1 for the very high group; HV, H3, H2 and H1 for the high group; MH, M3, M2 and M1 for the middle group; and LM, L3, L2 and L1 for the low group.

The most comprehensive update to the E-Government Survey assessment in 2022 comes in the form of a refined formula for generating the Online Service Index. The new approach introduces a standardization and normalization regimen to further align the OSI with Local Online Service Index (LOSI) by categorizing the assessment questions into 5 discrete thematic areas forming 5 subindices: institutional framework (IF), services provision (SP), content provision (CP), technology (TEC) and e-participation (EPI)—with the OSI as a whole calculated based on the normalized values for each subindex. Each of the 5 subindices of OSI are assigned a weight based on the relative proportion of questions belonging to the associated category in the OSI assessment questionnaire, as presented below:

For more detailed information on the UN E-Government Survey methodology, please access the full methodology in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, or Spanish.

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