H83 - Public Administration; Public Sector Accounting and AuditsReturn

E-government is currently a term that has been resonating in the public space for several years, which is why a lot of attention is being paid to it. Some states of the European Union are doing better, and some are worse in this area. Given this trend, all states must increase their efforts towards more effective e-government. The article aims to create clusters of European Union states in 2020 and 2022 according to their level of e-government. The sample consists of 27 states of the European Union, and the indicators used include the E-Government Development Index, E-participation index, Online service index, Telecommunication Infrastructure Index, and Human capital index. In addition, the objective of the article is achieved through correlation and cluster analysis. The countries of the European Union were divided into six clusters in 2020 and 2022. The best cluster in both years includes Finland, Estonia, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden, while the worst countries include, for example, Bulgaria and Romania. In general, the countries that were the best/worst in 2020 are also the best/worst in 2022.

Final account is a particularity of local government. All municipalities are obliged to compile it. The purpose of a final account is to summarize the yearly economic activity of a municipality. The aim of the article is to analyse the accessibility of final accounts to citizens based on a performed research. A municipality is the primary community of citizens. The law defines a municipality as an accounting entity obliged to keep books. Unlike companies, which compile annual report, a municipality compiles a final account. According to applicable legislation, a municipality is not obliged to make its final account public. The analysis of accessibility of final accounts has been performed within a selected district of the Moravian-Silesian Region comprising of seventy-two municipalities. The result is a finding that a vast majority of municipalities take advantage of the loophole in the law and forbid citizens from accesing the information on the economic activity of the municipality. The solution seems to be to amend the relevant legislation with the obligation to make the final account public, analogically to the obligation for companies to make their annual report public.

The paper is focused on the evaluation of the level of governance from the perspective of Good Governance concept in the European Union countries. Research of the state of governance in the EU countries is based on the evaluation of Good Governance indicators defined by the World Bank. These are the aggregate indicators characterizing the quality of democracy, political stability, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, quality of legal system and corruption, which in whole describe the state of Good Governance. On their basis, there is calculated the composite index of Good Governance. The composite index of Good Governance is observed in the period from 1996 to 2013 for the selected groups of the European Union countries. In the empirical part of the paper, there is evaluated the actual state of Good Governance in the EU countries in 2013 and compared the state and progression of Good Governance in the European Union countries in the years 1996 and 2013. The research is based on soft data, since most of the data for the evaluation of Good Governance have qualitative nature. The research results especially indicate the excellent state of governance in the Nordic countries and also acknowledge the convergence of the level of governance in the EU countries.

E-government benchmarking frameworks are important as they guide countries' focus of their efforts to develop information and communication policies and allocating resources to implement these strategies. With the decrease of importance of basic information society indicators in the past and use of new technologies and trends, new criteria and approaches needed to be introduced in measuring e-government development. Therefore, the existing frameworks should be updated and reframed. The main aim of this paper is to examine a progress in the structure of these benchmarking frameworks and propose a new benchmarking framework, which uses modern technologies such as cloud computing, open data, big data, social media and e-participation. It focuses on this new set of domains of activities and assesses many of them. Methods of decomposition and aggregation are used.

The article deals with the theoretical background of the alternative way of financing, building and operating of public infrastructure and public services. The alternative way mentioned above is the Public Private Partnership concept. The eligibility of Public private partnership is evaluated through the theory of organisation and operation of the public administration.