The Cost of Citizen Access to Government Services in China: A Survey of Eight Common Services in All Provinces

To provide better services to citizens is an essential goal of digital government. People believe that online services will be more convenient to citizens because they can reduce the costs by avoiding visits to agency physical offices. There are few researches working on the situation that whether this cost reduction actually comes true or not for citizens. In this poster we argue that it is necessary to evaluate the quality of online services because of the huge investments in building the necessary platforms. To understand the cost for citizen to access government services of the provinces in China, this study reviews the eight most common services offered by all 31 provincial government websites in three consecutive years (2018-2020). The costs are calculated using two factors; the first is the number of visits to physical offices needed and the second is the level of government providing the service, which represents the distance a person needs to travel. Thus, the total cost for citizens in this case is related to how many times they have to visit physical offices and how far away those offices are. This approach allows to have an estimate of the cost for each online service in each of the 31 provincial governments.