Could e-Government Development Reduce Corruption in South America?

Abstract

This paper analyzes the United Nations (UN)'s e-government de-velopment index (EGDI) and the Transparency International (TI)'s corruption perception index (CPI) of South American countries and identifies weather or not a Pearson "r" correlation exists between these two indexes. To do so, we have analyzed indexes from the years 2003, 2004, 2005, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016. Our findings show that a high positive annual correla-tion does exist, and the respective conclusions and recommenda-tions are drawn from the findings. They showed a general corre-lation average of 0.701 (high correlation) between the EGDI and CPI indexes studied, therefore it would stand to reason that e-government development does indeed contribute to the factors that could reduce corruption in South America. Making this anal-ysis not a causality study.

Keywords

• pearson correlation coeffi-cient
• e-government
• united na-tions e-government development index
• corruption
• transparency interna-tional corruption perception
• transparency
• south america