ABSTRACT
Abstract E-government has made tremendous progress and became a global phenomenon in the past two decades, attracting attention from both researchers and practitioners. A growing body of research continues to focus on explaining the e-government divide and to determine the factors impacting e-government development. To date, however, few studies have examined the impact of external environment on e-government development worldwide; this study intends to fill some of the gaps. With combined data at country level, we used structural equation modeling statistical techniques to test the impact of environmental factors (economy, democracy, education, Internet usage, and peer pressure) on e-government development and explored the relationships among these factors. The results indicate that the overall external environment does affect e-government development at the national level, with Internet usage, democracy, and education exhibiting significant influence. Economy can also indirectly impact e-government by affecting other factors. However, this study did not find any significant impact of peer pressure on e-government at the national level.
