Perspectives of citizens towards e-government in Thailand and Indonesia: A multigroup analysis

t Thailand and Indonesia are two developing countries still in the early stages of e-government implementation. An understanding of their citizens’ perspectives can help the governments of these countries better plan their services and also provide useful information to governments of other developing countries. The current study uses a new survey instrument to assess the importance of e-government services and website success factors from the perspective of citizens. Using multigroup analysis to validate the instrument, it identifies that an important difference between the perceptions of citizens of the two countries is that in Thailand, the importance of financial transaction services is negatively related to the importance of citizen identification with the e-government site whereas in Indonesia this relationship is insignificant. Only two expected relationships were found to be equivalent across both datasets, i.e., the importance of financial transactions services is positively related to the importance of website efficiency and the importance of local information services is positively related to the importance of citizen identification with the site. The multigroup analysis showed that citizens in both countries interpreted the survey instrument similarly but had very different expectations for their egovernment services.