Factors Influencing the Use of Electronic Government Services in Brazil

This paper explores the data from the Brazilian “ICT in households and enterprises Survey” in order to understand how the individuals’ use of egovernment services is related to the location of access to the internet and their usage capabilities. The research uses Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach, with results indicating that for all social classes the use of e-government is strongly related to users’ capabilities, expressed by their use of e-mail, e-commerce and efinance and that its use is favored by home and workplace access to the internet over other alternatives, such as lan-houses and public telecentres. The paper also discusses its implications for public policy making.


INTRODUCTION
The development of the Information Society includes the risk of creating a new form of social exclusion: that of individuals deprived of digital resources.Although digital inclusion has been widely studied (WILHELM, 2000;CASTELLS, 2001;2010;SORJ;GUEDES, 2005;MORI;ASSUMPÇÃO, 2007;MADON et al., 2009) it cannot be reduced to providing physical access to the technological resources, but must consider user diversity and ability for the different uses (entertainment, communication, education, ecommerce, e-government, etc.).
The Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br, in Portuguese)  The access to the survey's microdata allows the in-depth analysis of different aspects of internet users' behavior.For the present paper, the research question chosen is: How is the individuals' adoption and use of e-government services related to their preferred location of access to the internet and their usage capabilities?
Answers to these questions should help in evaluating the effectiveness of (usually very high cost of nation-wide) public policies related to promoting the provision of internet access in public locations or at home and the need for user information and training.In fact, many of the once ubiquitous lan-houses (estimated at 108,000 in 2009) are going out of business despite government support, while the demand falls for the about 20,000 public telecenters (ABCID, 2013;CGI, 2012).
The results of this research should contributeing to an improved understanding of the factors that influence the usage of e-gov services, in order to orient the definition of public policies for digital inclusion (in this case, the usage of e-gov services).
The paper is organized as follows: section 2 presents a brief literature review and the research reference model.Section 3 describes the research design and the methodology employed.Data Analysis and discussions, contributions are contained in section 4; final considerations are presented in section 5.  (TAKAHASHI, 2000), also aiming at improving citizens' access to government services and democratic participation.

Digital Inclusion
Restricting the problem to the dichotomy between "having" or "not having" access to computers and the internet is an oversimplification.In fact, research focusing only on citizens' access to technological artifacts, according to (AVGEROU, 2003) has a "technological determinism bias".This indicates that digital exclusion is a complex issue, requiring considering other dimensions beyond the dichotomy of included and excluded individuals (SORJ; GUEDES, 2005).
In this line, the present paper will not focus on the access to digital resources, but on its qualified use, focusing on the factors contributing to the use of e-government services.Although E-government may have different definitions, our research considers the use of internet to improve the provision of government services to citizens, information and democratic participation.

Electronic Government Services
Governments have made extensive use of these technological resources in order to increase its offer of services to citizens and also improving their effectiveness and quality.These systems, based on the use of Information and Communication Technologies, and, in particular, the subsystems that provide the interface with citizens, are studied under the generic name of electronic government, or, in short, e-gov (DINIZ et al., 2009;SANTOS;REINHARD, 2011).
Electronic Government as a research area, besides studying the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for the interaction between citizens and private organizations with public administration (the socalled "front office", does also include the "back office": automation and integration of the different public administration processes and interorganizational systems communication.Haldenwang (2004:418) understand e-gov as the strategic and co-ordinated use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the public administration and political decision making.
Although the most visible dimension of electronic government relates to the provision of government services in electronic form, there are also other applications that studied under the name of e-gov.
The popularization and positive image of these electronic services, such as the citizen's electronic filing of Income Tax Adjustments (REINHARD; MOYA, 2002) and electronic voting system (AVGEROU et al., 2009) have led to equate electronic government with electronic citizenfacing service provision in current language.However Diniz et al. (2009) point out that the field has to be expanded to include also other application of the technology in Government activities.
One classification, used for several authors such as by Cunha and Miranda (2008) and also Barbosa, Pozzebon and Diniz (2013) and Haldenwang (2007), identifies three major categories of e-gov applications: • Public Management applications: the use of ICT to improve the management of government activities, administrative processes and resource usage and also the formulation, implementation, monitoring and control of public policies.
• E-services: the use of ICT for the communication with and the provision of services in electronic form to citizens and private organizations.
• E-democracy: the use of ICT resources in order to allow citizens to become better informed about government and facilitate their increasing participation in forming public opinion and in decision making processes.

Amartya Sen's Capability Approach
Amartya Sen proposed the Capability Approach as a reference for the human development paradigm (SEN, 2001;REINHARD, 2010) having been used as a basis for several development indicators, such as the Human Development Index and the ICT Development Index (ITU, 2011).

The Capability Approach offers an objective basis for comparisons of differences of well-being between individuals (PRENDERGAST, 2005), thus overcoming the limitations of utilitarian approaches that do not allow this comparison, basic for well-being economics.
For the Capability Approach, the properties or characteristics of goods or resources have to be seen in terms "what they do to human beings".By taking possession of an object (a commodity), the owner is able to "command" these characteristics.However, (SEN, 2001) cautions that these characteristics do not inform in advance how these goods will be utilized.Therefore, the possession of a good will not necessarily result in an increase in the person's well-being because its use cannot be determined beforehand.The change will only be in the possibilities of achievements a person can obtain from these characteristics.Therefore, Sen (2001) argues that the well-being of a person should consider its "functionings", that is, "what the person succeeds in doing with the commodities and characteristics at his or her command" (SEN, 1999:6).
The achieved functioning will depend both on the possessed resource and on the way this resource is used.Thus, they have the freedom to choose among different functionings.This set of functionings persons can achieve is called their Capabilities.
According to Sen (2001), the process of conversion of the goods' characteristics into functionings depends on many factors, personal, cultural and social, that are called "conversion factors".Different persons having access to the same resources can end up with quite different functionings.

RESEARCH REFERENCE MODEL AND METHODOLOGY
There are multiple approaches to the study of technological innovations adoption and use such as e-gov services by citizens.One major line of research is based on the use of the Technological Acceptance Model (TAM) (DAVIS, 1989) and related models, such as TAM 2 (VENKATESH; DAVIS, 2000); UTAUT (VENKATESH et al., 2003).
These models consider the perception of potential users regarding the usefulness, ease of use and other attributes of the technology, in order to predict the users' attitude toward using the technology.
The present study is based on secondary data that measure the effective use of egov services, instead of just the users' attitude (leading to the future decision to eventually use the services) and therefore going one step further than those models.These models also do not consider explicitly individual user preferences that are not related to the model variables and therefore their freedom to possibly choose not to use the services, despite favorable conditions identified by the models.
The Capability Approach, presented in section 2.3, has therefore, some advantages over those models for our study, as it allows considering effective user actions instead of just perceptions, and including the dimension of freedom and ability to choose among alternatives.
Figure 1 is a schematic representation focusing on the specific variables of the paper's reference model.

As research propositions we then present the following reasoning: Starting with the comparison of preferred location of internet access and its influence on the user's capabilities (conversion factor), for which we propose as proxies the actual use of e-mail, e-commerce (search function) and e-financial services (checking banking accounts).
The "use of email", as one of the main electronic communication tools was used as one of the proxy variables, because it is understood that this is a basic electronic communication competence, being also a requirement for the use of some e-gov services (e.g.filling police report).The inclusion of the "use of e-commerce" variable is based on arguments presented by Diniz et al. (2009) for whom the offer of egovernment services began to grow in Brazil with the diffusion of e-commerce usage, thus supporting the assumption that the use of ecommerce competence contributes to the use of egov.Finally, "financial services" is proposed as another proxy variable for competence due to both its similarity with and its direct use in e-gov services (e.g.paying taxes) It should be noted that the choice of e-commerce and financial services variables are restricted to consulting (searching) activities, since some users may not possess credit cards or other necessary tools, or have other reasons not to carry out the complete transaction, despite their competence to interact with the system.

The research uses the following selection of variables from the CGI survey: (1) Demographic variables: age, economic data, access to computers and internet, preferred location for internet access; (2) Social Class constructed by CGI from the respondents' demographic data, as defined by the Brazilian Census Bureau's (IBGE) methodology.
The present inquiry is restricted to the analysis of Social Classes C and DE, where digital inclusion issues and related public policies are seen as a national priority and also due to the fact that the variance and changes in digital competences and e-gov usage in these classes was the largest during the period.
The category "Use of e-mail" refers to answers to the survey question "have you sent or received e-mail in the last 3 months?"The category "use of e-commerce" refers to answers to the question "have you searched the internet for availability or prices of products or services in the last 12 months?The category "use of financial services" refers to answers to the question "have you used Internet Banking for consultation in the last 3 months?"These variables are used as proxies for user competencies that will be considered as antecedents to e-gov usage.
The category "use of e-government" considers the use, in the last 12 months, of any of a series of common e-government services offered to citizens (requesting documents or personal information, paying taxes or service fees, registering for educational or health services, etc).

Binary Logistic Regressions are used to analyze the relationships between the (dichotomous)
variables (HAMILTON, 2009).The absence of significant multicollinearity in the data set is verified through VIF and tolerance statistical tests.
According to the research model (Figure 1) the first set of tested relationships (posited as influences) considered the variables "preferred location of access to the internet" (this categorical variable was transformed into dummies variables) and proxies for use competencies (E-commerce, E-mail and Financial Services).The next set of logistic regressions aimed at assessing the relationships between competencies and the use of e-gov services, followed by a logistic regression of the use of egov services against the preferred location of access to the internet.
The software Stata was used for the stepwise logistic regressions.For data analysis, we considered only the odds ratio values that are statistically significant at the 95% confidence level.

DATA ANALYSIS
Table 3 shows the location of preferred access to the Internet.Percentages are calculated over the total population of internet users in a social class.Classes A and B and also D and E are combined for convenience of analysis.

Table 3 -Preferred location of access to the Internet of E-gov users' (percentage)
Source: Research data.
The data show a general increase in access to the internet at home, especially in the lower classes.The Country's favorable economic situation during the period (growth of household income) and public policies for the reduction of hardware and connection cost allowed the increased affordance of ICT resources at home, leading to the corresponding reduction of access in other locations.Especially noteworthy is the dwindling demand for the once ubiquitous Lanhouses (many of them already going out of business).Table 4  The variable "usage of electronic government services", presented in Table 5, is used as the measure for the model's "Functionings" (SEN, 2001) Table 5  Tables 6 to 10 present the results of the logistic regressions.The "odds ratios" presented in these tables should be interpreted as follows: the coefficient 2.5 in Table 6 (Class C, "at Home and Work" in 2007) means that the probability to be a user of e-gov services of a user that has access to the internet from home or work is 2.5 times more likely than that of a user that accesses the internet from another location.Similarly, the coefficient 0.7, being lower than 1, indicates that a user that accesses the internet from a lan-house is less likely to use e-gov, as compared to a user from another location.Blank cells indicate that the corresponding coefficients are not statistically significant.
Our focus in the analyses is on the usage of egov services in Social Classes C and DE, since these classes are the main target of public policies for digital inclusion and also because in these classes there is a larger variation in the overall level of e-gov services adoption and therefore the larger interest and implications of an explanatory model.Coefficients for "At Home and Work" access to the internet in tables 6, 7 and 8, being significantly larger than 1, show that access from these locations is significantly related to an increase in internet usage competencies (as represented by the proxies e-mail, e-commerce and e-finance usage), therefore supporting the first set of propositions of the paper (access location being influencing the capability conversion factor).
Tables 6 and 7 show also some larger than 1 coefficients for the other access locations.In these cases, however, the value of the coefficients falls over time, indicating a reduction of importance of these locations, leading to values less than 1 or non-significant in the last year 2011, thus supporting the proposition that the eventual users of e-gov services from these locations may have migrated to more the convenient access locations (at home and work).
Table 9 shows that the use of all three services (e-mail, e-commerce and e-finance) contributes significantly to increase the probability of their users being also users of e-government services, with a special weight for e-finance services.
These findings thus support the second part of our research propositions: the developed capabilities influencing the choice for the functioning (use of e-gov services).

CONCLUSIONS AND MANAGERIAL IMPLICATIONS
The data analyses support our propositions of the positive contribution of internet access from home or work to the development of internet usage competencies and the contribution of these factors to e-government services usage, as answers to the paper's initial research question.

Managerial and public policy implications:
These results show that public policies promoting home access to the internet, such as reducing sales taxes on computers and internet access and low-interest financing for home computers are more effective in leading to an increase in the use of e-government than the effort to reorient lanhouses and telecenters to become e-gov access points.
Home access to the internet contributes to the increase of citizens' e-literacy, also in the lower social classes and has also an impact on their egov use.Nevertheless, the lower percentage of egovernment services use among lower social classes indicates the need for additional research to better understand the reasons for them not to use these services, even among users that have internet access at home.
In the beginning of the last decade there was a nation-wide boom of private lan-house (most of them very small family-run businesses).Many of them have since closed due to the rapidly falling demand, as shown in Table 3.The results of our study do not support government policies to provide incentives for the still large number of lan-houses and telecenters to become access and support points for e-government services.The theoretical contribution of this paper is to demonstrate the suitability and the development of a methodological approach operationalizing Sen's Capabilities Approach, based on CGI's Brazilian ICT usage variables in order to understand the factors and processes that constrain and influence citizens' decision to use egov services.On the other hand, as a contribution to practice, the results of this inquiry could aid in the shaping of alternative public policies for digital inclusion and the analysis of their effectiveness, such as implementation of public telecenters vis-à-vis facilitation of internet access from home and the understanding citizens' cultural and educational constraints in the process.