Stuart Thorson

E-government in China: Bringing economic development through administrative reform

Abstract Within China, government leaders are using information technology to drive efforts both to accelerate decentralized public administration and at the same time to enhance governments ability to oversee key activities. The concurrent pursuit of these two seemingly paradoxical objectives is, in turn, motivated by an explicit desire to modernize and make more competitive the Chinese economy. Considering what Chinese leaders mean by ‘administrative reform’ is a key to resolving the apparent contradiction between administrative decentralization and government oversight. In particular, this paper provides a number of illustrations of how Chinese e-government initiatives can be best understood as vehicles intended to support economic development through an increasingly transparent and decentralized administration while at the same time providing the central government the information and ability to efficiently monitor and potentially steer economic activity at a more abstract level.

A mixture model of global internet capacity distributions

This article develops a preferential attachment‐based mixture model of global Internet bandwidth and investigates it in the context of observed bandwidth distributions between 2002 and 2011. Our longitudinal analysis shows, among other things, that the bandwidth share distributions—and thus bandwidth differences—exhibit considerable path dependence where country proportions of international bandwidth in 2011 can be substantially accounted for by a preferential attachment‐based mixture of micro‐level processes. Our preferential attachment model, consistent with empirical data, does not predict increasing concentration of bandwidth within top‐ranked countries. We argue that recognizing the strong, but nuanced, historical inertia of bandwidth distributions is helpful in better discriminating among competing theoretical perspectives on the global digital divide as well as in clarifying policy discussions related to gaps between bandwidth‐rich and bandwidth‐poor countries.

Global Internet connectedness: 2002–2011

We examine the communications networks formed by direct international Internet links, weighted by bandwidth capacity, each year over the 2002–2011 period. While the 2011 network closely resembles that of 2002, the network has become more tightly interconnected over time. With countries as nodes, connectedness was measured by both changes in median degree and overall network density. We also considered networks formed by aggregating countries into United Nations (UN) continent and region categories as well as network communities identified through tightness of degree interconnection weighted by bandwidth. While relative connectedness as measured by percentage of bandwidth staying within UN geographic regions is decreasing, the percentage remaining within the continent has been fairly constant over the period. All of this must, of course, be understood in the context of enormous total international bandwidth growth between 2002 and 2011 at all levels of analysis.

Network Approach to Regime Type and Global Internet Connectedness

We explore the relationship between regime type and country access to the Internet at both domestic and global levels by conducting longitudinal analyses of economic, population, and Internet data between 2002 and 2011. In particular, we investigate how a countrys position in the global Internet network is associated with the countrys type of political institution while attempting to take into account its economic growth and population (so-called scale effects). Our analysis shows that liberal democracies dominated the global Internet network both in 2002 and in 2011, followed by polyarchies and electoral democracies. Finally, our panel regression and network analyses suggest that it is important to consider network characteristics in investigating whether and how a countrys regime type influences the countrys Internet adoption. We discuss implications of these and other findings for idea flows and economic developments.