This article empirically assesses the relationship between government use of the web, service performance, and cost‐effectiveness. It tests and challenges the assumption, prevalent in government thinking and in the Digital Era Governance (DEG) quasi‐paradigm, that the delivery of web‐based public services is associated with better outcomes. English local government is used as a test case, for which (uniquely) good‐quality full‐population time‐series data for council performance, cost, and web quality are available. A new panel data set is constructed covering 2002–2008, allowing the actual relationship between web performance and council cost and quality to be estimated using dynamic regression models which control for both general changes over time and the time‐invariant differences between councils. Consistent growth is shown in the scope and quality of local government web provision. Despite this, and governmental enthusiasm for bringing services online, no association is found between web development and performance, or cost‐effectiveness. The article concludes that governments’ enthusiasm for citizen‐facing digital government is not supported by this empirical data, and that a skeptical view is warranted of DEG's advocacy of digitalization as a core focus for service improvement.

中文翻译：

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地方政府的绩效，成本效益和网络使用：一项实证分析

本文根据经验评估了政府对Web的使用，服务性能和成本效益之间的关系。它测试并挑战了在政府思维和数字时代治理（DEG）准范例中普遍存在的假设，即基于Web的公共服务的交付与更好的结果相关联。使用英国当地政府作为测试用例，针对该用例，可获得（唯一）关于市政局绩效，成本和网络质量的高质量全人口时间序列数据。构建了涵盖2002-2008年的新面板数据集，从而可以使用动态回归模型来估计Web绩效与理事会成本和质量之间的实际关系，该模型既可以控制一段时间内的一般变化，也可以控制理事会之间的时不变。地方政府网络供应的范围和质量显示出持续增长。尽管如此，并且政府热衷于将服务联机，但Web开发与性能或成本效益之间没有关联。本文得出的结论是，这些经验数据不支持政府对面向公民的数字化政府的热情，而且对于DEG倡导数字化作为服务改进的核心焦点的看法也值得怀疑。