E-Government is a major element of the emerging Information Society. It is one of the primary vehicles used by governments across the world for public sector reforms and to offer high quality services at reduced cost to citizens and other stakeholders. There are at present various initiatives for advancing e-government and e-society in general at national, regional and global levels. Notable among these initiatives are the eEurope, e-Africa and e-ASEAN programmes. Several international and corporate organizations (for instance the United Nations and Accenture) benchmark countries in terms of the availability of requisite technical infrastructure and human capital available for e-government development. They also report on the maturity of public services provided online. The United Nations Department for Economics and Social Affairs (UN-DESA), Accenture, Centre for Public Policy, Brown University (CPP-BU) and the Economist Intelligence Unit/IBM Institute for Business Values (EIU), provide annual reports on e-government readiness and online service delivery.

This survey examines the reports provided by these four organizations between 2000 and 2004. It also investigates the availability of specific features and a set of 20 common services on 67 government websites spread across the major regions of the world. The services are the EU list of common public services to be delivered electronically within the context of the eEurope initiative. These services are classified into Income Generating, Registration, Returns, Permits and Licenses services.