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The purpose of this paper is to present factors that affect e-voting adoption in the Middle East and, in particular, Jordan. Changing the election voting method for the people in Jordan from traditional voting to interactive voting via the web needs exploration to understand the factors affecting e-voting adoption by citizens. Therefore, this paper reports on a study undertaken to identify the main factors that would influence citizens’ intentions to adopt the use of an e-voting system in Jordan, using an established e-government adoption model and a theoretical framework consisting of the diffusion of innovations (DOI) theory and the technology acceptance model (TAM).

A survey study of 267 Jordanian citizens who were internet users investigated the influence of the aforementioned factors on the adoption and use of e-voting websites. Multiple regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses.

Contrary to the previous established e-government adoption model, beliefs and website design were not found to be significant predictors of the intention to use e-voting websites. The paper found that trust in government, attitudes, perceived usefulness and complexity were significant factors in Jordanian citizens’ intentions to use e-voting websites.

This is one of few studies to have used an established e-government adoption model to test the adoption of e-voting as one of the e-government applications. In addition, this paper is one of the few to examine the factors that influence the adoption and use of e-voting systems by citizens in the Middle East. Although the previous e-government adoption model showed the impact of attitude to be non-significant on e-government adoption, this paper shows the significant influence of attitudes on citizens’ intentions to use e-voting websites. On the other hand, this paper supports previous e-government adoption studies in showing the importance of including constructs of the DOI theory (relative advantage and complexity) and those related to TAM (perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use) when considering the topic of e-government adoption in a Middle Eastern country, although previous studies have shown similarities between these constructs.

This paper aims to debate the main factors influencing trust in mobile government (m-government) in the developing country of Jordan. The transformation from government services offered through a government website to services offered via smartphone devices needs further investigation to better understand the factors that might influence citizens’ trust in m-government, in particular, young citizens. This paper presents the concept of m-government and reports on a study of the main predictors affecting citizens’ trust in it. The theoretical framework used is based on the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT).

A survey study of 510 Jordanian young citizens, who had access to the internet and were smartphone users, investigated the influence of the identified factors on their trust in m-government. The hypotheses testing used multiple regression analysis.

Contrary to previous claims reported in relation to facilitating conditions, the following predictors: trust in government, word of mouth (WOM), social influence and facilitating conditions were found to be significant factors in predicting Jordanian citizens’ trust in m-government services.

This is one of few studies to investigate what influences trust in m-government by citizens in Jordan. The current research significantly contributes to the literature by incorporating factors from the UTAUT model with personal perception factors to elucidate m-government adoption. The integration of UTAUT with factors such as “WOM”, is a direction that can be followed in research on the adoption of and trust in e-government and m-government by citizens in any social community. This study clearly identities the relationship between m-government trust and the WOM construct, which is rarely discussed in this type of research context. Although the facilitating conditions construct is claimed to be non-significant in the presence of performance expectancy and effort expectancy, the current research shows the importance of including the facilitating conditions construct when considering the topic of m-government trust in Jordan. Finally, this paper provides a foundation for future empirical studies on the adoption of m-government.

Expert systems (ES) design emulates expertise with the intention that the ES be used by non-experts. This study aims to predict end-user intention and use of ES by proposing a research model that extends the basic components of the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) by including additional relevant factors to ES, including the expert domain, perceived relevance, reliability, quality of ES and management support, which directly and indirectly influence the end-user intention to use an expert system.

A structural equation model (SEM), using LISREL, was used to test the measurement and structural models using a sample of 205 end-users of expert systems in the USA. These users of expert systems come from a variety of domains. The factors include both internal and external factors for the individual level of analysis design of this study.

The results showed behavioral intention had the strongest effect on usage, followed by perceived relevance. With respect to the factors that impact intention, perceived relevance had the strongest total effect, followed by attitude. For attitude, effort expectancy had the strongest total effect, followed by management support and perceived relevance.

The results of this study should assist decision-makers in planning training and communications about the use of expert systems so that the expert systems will be used as intended.

The originality of this work resides in the addition of external factors to the UTAUT model that helps provide advice to practitioners in the support needed to insure expert system implementation success.

This paper investigates the impact of microfinance on poverty gap which is the shortfall in income or consumption expenditures below $1.90, $3.20 and $5.50 per day. The paper’s primary goal is to investigate how microloans have impacted the severity of poverty and influenced the cost of poverty eradication in Latin America, empirically evaluate these effects and offer appropriate policy recommendations.

This paper used panel data for 13 Latin American countries from world bank spanning the period 2001–2019 and Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares model for heterogeneous cointegrated panels. This study used Gross Loan Portfolio per active borrowers, gross domestic product per capita, Gini index, Inflation and Unemployment rate as independent variables and poverty gaps as dependent variables.

Poverty gaps narrow as the loan per borrower increases, and the degree of effect differs with the poverty line, with the magnitude increasing as the poverty line falls, underscoring microloans as an effective tool in closing poverty gaps and lowering the cost of poverty eradication. Growth of GDP per capita is helpful reducing the poverty gap, especially for the less poor of the poor. Inflation and unemployment have no to little impact on the severe poverty gaps, but they start to matter when the poverty line is $5.5 per day. Finally, income distribution inequality widens the poverty gap regardless of the poverty line used.

This study suggests several implications. For example, Latin American nations need to embrace tangible policies that encourage economic growth while reducing inequalities in income distribution to effectively eradicate poverty. More supportive environment is necessary to increase the effectiveness of microfinance operations, particularly for the poorest populations. Microfinance institutions need to set less stringent conditions for loan accessibility and repayment schedules that are commensurate with different levels of poverty. Finally, strengthening microfinance as a strategic policy to gradually close poverty gaps and reduce the cost of poverty eradication.

This paper investigates the impact of trade liberalization measured by trade openness (OPN) and tariffs on women empowerment measured by the gender gap index and gender development index, for two groups of Arab countries divided based on their income levels using annual data for the period 1995–2020. The study also considers other factors that may influence the gender gap, such as GDP growth and the female unemployment rate. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues and explorers whether the effects of trade liberalization differ based on the countries' income levels.

This study employs the fully modified ordinary least squares (FM-OLS) regression model for heterogeneous cointegrated panels to examine the impact of trade liberalization on women empowerment. The study constructs an empirical two regression model of women empowerment measured by the gender gap model and gender development model for the two groups of higher-income countries and lower and middle-income countries.

The authors’ findings reveal that the impact of OPN on the gender gap varies between the two groups of Arab countries where more OPN within the higher-income group may increase the gender disparity, while it may reduce disparity within the lower and middle-income countries. In addition, GDP growth may reduce the gender disparity, while female unemployment raises the gender disparity between the two groups of countries in the long run. Findings also reveal that more OPN, tariffs and female unemployment may reduce gender development within the two groups, but more GDP growth may support the gender development in the long run.

This paper not only assesses the impact of trade liberalization on women empowerment generally, but also assess the women empowerment via two indices that are the gender gap and gender development in Arab countries which is – to the knowledge of the researchers – not yet investigated; further it explores if the effects of trade liberalization differs based on the countries' income levels.

This study aims to explore how citizens socialise and network in relation to using and adopting e-government. The paper suggests that governments need to consider social networks when introducing e-government initiatives. Using qualitative research, this study explores the reasons, fears, motivations and factors with respect to e-government relevant to two social groups of people, those who do and those who do not have regular access to the internet in the Middle Eastern country of Jordan.

The study analyses the results of focus groups representing different social groups of Jordanian citizens across the digital divide. The focus groups followed the nominal group method to explore questions relating to e-government adoption. The nominal group method provided preliminary categorisations of responses; however, further initial and axial coding of data were used to analyse recordings of focus group transcripts.

Contrary to previous research, this study highlights the importance of considering factors that most likely appear as organizational terms, such as resistance to change, when investigating the adoption of e-government within a social community. Cultural and social themes that emerged include resistance to change, wasta (favouritism), and word of mouth (WOM). Few qualitative studies have investigated the main factors relevant to the adoption of e-government by citizens in the Middle East.

To investigate the adoption of technological innovations including e-government, this paper encourages researchers and practitioners in information technologies (IT) to consider cultural and social factors that have been rarely discussed in IT research in general and e-government in particular. Examples of these factors are wasta (favouritism) and WOM.

This paper aims to engage with the growing debate on the factors that affect e‐government adoption in the developing country of Jordan. The change from traditional interactions between government and citizens in Jordan to interaction via the web needs further exploration in order to understand the factors that might affect e‐government adoption by citizens. This paper therefore aims to report on a study to identify the main factors that influence citizens' intention to adopt e‐government websites in Jordan, using a theoretical framework consisting of diffusion of innovation theory (DOI) and the technology acceptance model (TAM).

A survey study of 400 Jordanian citizens who were internet users investigated the influence of the aforementioned factors on the adoption and use of e‐government websites. Multiple regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses.

Contrary to previous research, trust in the internet, relative advantage, compatibility and perceived ease of use were not found to be significant predictors of intention to use e‐government websites. Trust in government, website design, beliefs, complexity and perceived usefulness were significant factors in Jordanian citizens' intention to use e‐government websites.

This study is one of the few to examine what influences adoption and use of e‐government websites by citizens in the Middle East. The study clearly identifies the relationship between the constructs of “beliefs” (religious views) and website design and e‐government adoption, and explores the influence of attitudes towards e‐government adoption in Jordan. Although previous studies show similarities between the constructs related to DOI (relative advantage and complexity) and those related to TAM (perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEoU)), this research shows the importance of including these constructs when considering the topic of e‐government adoption in a Middle Eastern country.