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The purpose of this paper is to examine the main factors influencing government openness, develop a global government openness index (GGOI) for assessing the progress of government openness and investigate how the factors contribute to the advancement of open government by individual countries and country groups by income.

This study identifies the four factors and adopts them into four variables for making GGOI: accountability (ACC), citizen participation and freedom (CPF), transparency (TRA) and information and communication technology (ICT). To calculate GGOI, panel data for 134 countries from 2006 to 2015 were used.

GGOI scores constantly improved with an annual growth rate of 2.09 percent. Countries with high ACC values tend to have high TRA scores, resulting in high GGOI scores. While the differences in ACC and TRA were steady over the period, ICT increased the most in all groups. To boost ICT performance as a channel to support other variables, middle-income countries should make further effort for citizens to use ICT capabilities toward enhancing the levels of CPF and TRA.

This study presents a global picture of the advancement of open government and provides insights into specific areas that can be diagonalized.

The GGOI could be used as a useful assessment tool to measure the progress of government openness in countries and implement policies and action plans for improving government openness.

The GGOI covers the areas related to legal, administrative, participatory and technological factors and provides the factors’ inter-relationships for the composition of GGOI.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship and interactions among trust, information and communication technologies (ICT) and country income levels.

This study adopts the standardization method by Osberg and Sharpe (2005) and analyzes the changes in global trends, coefficient of variations, and correlations. The statistical data consist of panel data for 28 countries from 2007 to 2014.

Trust in people (TP) and institutional confidence (IC) have different shapes of movement over the period and the change speed of IC has decreased much faster than that of TP. While TP in high income countries is positioned in relatively high ranks, IC of middle income countries tends to be ranked in higher ranks. While the telecommunication infrastructure index (TII) has continuously increased in all countries for the entire period, open service index (OSI) has not increased at the same rate since improving OSI is not easier than TII. As OSI increases, IC may affect an increase to a certain point and then decrease in an inverted U-shape. The result of this relationship emphasizes on the importance of OSI along with TII in building trust, particularly with institutions.

The examination of the relationship of trust, ICT and income in quantifiable values can contribute to understanding the direction of movement and change speed toward trust building with people and institutions.

To promote levels of trust, countries should consider different strategies for growing TP and institutions and concentrate on improving ICT-mediated services more than installing ICT facilities.

Quantifying the interactions of a qualitative concept of trust with ICT facilities, online services, and income levels presents an in-depth analysis of TP and with institutions.