Using data envelopment analysis (DEA) to assess government web portals performance

In the last few years, researchers have evaluated the performance of e-government portals in order to identify best practices and understand some of the factors that influence the quality of the information and services they provide to citizens. Most of these evaluations consider only the results or outputs, but ignore the inputs in terms of capabilities and resources that governments have available for these efforts. This paper argues that using data envelopment analysis (DEA) could help to better understand how efficient are governments in their use of certain inputs to produce high quality e-government portals. DEA is applied to calculate an efficiency score based on some portal characteristics (outputs) such as information, interaction, transaction, integration, and participation, and some organizational, institutional and contextual factors (inputs) such as government capacity, potential demand, and operation cost. The state government portals in Mexico are used for the empirical analysis. Our results indicate that there are some states that are never in the first places in terms of quality, but they have very few resources and capabilities and therefore, they are highly efficient.