E-government, corruption reduction and culture: a study based on panel data of 57 countries

Abstract

In e-government literature, there have been very few studies that constructed longitudinal data and empirically assessed the association of e-government development and corruption in different cultural context. This paper constructs a highly-balanced panel dataset of 57 countries from 2003 to 2014. We found that, although the level of corruption and e-government are negatively correlated, this association is a result of past time-invariant factors in different countries. The change of e-government development level seems to not affect the change ofcorruption levelin 57 countries in the past ten years. On the other hand, the magnitude of the way that e-government affect corruption does vary according to different cultural contexts. E-government development affects corruption more effectively in countries with a culture that have low uncertainty avoidance level and low power distance level. We also find that GDP per capita is a consistent estimator of corruption and e-government development, which implies that economic development is essential to cure corruption and provide funding for e-government development.