E-government in the gulf cooperation council countries: A comparative study

The main objective of this paper is to use a descriptive methodology to analyze comparatively the feasibility of e-government and the capability of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states to establish and to use e-government potentials in their public sectors. The paper attempts to facilitate this comparison by concentrating on certain dimensions based on the components of the Networked Readiness Index (NRI), published by the World Economic Forum. These dimensions include: environment, e-readiness, and usage components. The paper uses the operational definitions of these elements in order to facilitate the comparison. The underlying assumption of the paper is that the higher the level of ICT deployment the greater the level of e-government's readiness. It concludes that all GCC countries have made impressive strides towards using ICT and establishing e-government. The paper also finds remarkable variations among them. The United Arab Emirates is the best performer among GCC states and continued to lead them most of the time with remarkable progress in NRI world rankings and scores. Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait are competing neck-to-neck - with Qatar showing stronger will to outperform even the UAE. Saudi Arabia and Oman are slowly catching up with the others.