Development of eGovernment in the Visegrad countries

4. 2. 2008, Česky , Magyar , Polski

An April working meeting of the delegations of the Visegrad Four countries--V4DIS 2008, which will traditionally take place within the programme of the ISSS Conference in Hradec Kralove, will apart from other themes also deal with areas of development of eGovernment and with comparison of the achieved level in the whole Visegrad region. Representatives of each country will inform each other about current problems and together they will try to find a way to anticipate even more the development in the eGovernment domain in the whole region.

Objectives set for the eGovernment area result mainly from the original Lisbon strategy as well as from the conclusions of the Ministerial Conference in Manchester (UK) in 2005 extended by the initiative i2010 supplemented with an action plan for eGovernment in June 2006. In the course of Visegrad Conference in Hradec Kralove the speakers will lean also on the results of the autumn 4th Ministerial Conference of EU on eGovernment, which took place in Lisbon. Its participants agreed on four areas in which better results must be reached. First it is better crossborder cooperation of individual states that must be achieved and second, a consistent promotion of eGovernment should contribute to further removal of administrative obstacles for citizens as well as enterprises and provide availability and easy use of all services. Other objectives include achievement of higher social impact of new services and strengthening the position of eGovernment as one kind of means of support of democracy and transparency of processes in the public administration as well as self-government.

From the point of view of Visegrad region we can proclaim that the situation in the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and in Slovakia is nearing EU average or in some indicators it even surpasses it. Some shortage still remain in the computer availability in households--despite the highest investment of all Visegrad countries, the Czech Republic still remains in this sector under the EU average. Hungary and Slovakia reach better level; slightly worse indicators are shown by Poland.

Totally different situation is in the area of computer availability and use of information technologies in enterprises where the Czech Republic reaches in a number of indicators above-average state and also Hungary can pride itself on very good service availability in enterprise sector.

Electronic services for the citizens in the whole region are slightly falling behind, when their availability is however compared, the Czech Republic is at the best position of all Visegrad countries, just below EU average and a very good evaluation was given also to Public Administration Portal. Hungary and Poland have advanced in the past years only moderately; certain advancement is noticeable in the Slovak Republic, whose offer of the electronic services has been so far the weakest among Visegrad Four. An undisputable leader from the point of view of electronic services of eGovernment not only in the Visegrad neighbourhood, but also in the whole EU is Austria.