2.2 e-Government in the state of Kuwait
Kuwait is one of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) that made up of six countries, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait. All GCC countries score very high on the human capital index that means that citizen readiness is not an issue. However while the cooperation agreement materialised in other domains of economic activity; this does not seem to be the case for e-Government where each country is going it alone (Sahraoui, 2005). The only country that holds tangible promise to continuous increase in its e-Services is Bahrain and it is pioneering in its adoption of open standards for its e-Government initiatives in order to benefit from reduced costs and increased flexibility (AlSabti, 2005). Based on a UN report in 2004, not a single Middle East country has made it into the top 25 global e-Government readiness ranking. The e-Readiness report has shown a decline of the readiness index for all Arab countries (UN, 2004). In addition, the Economist Intelligence Unit assesses the Arab countries’ e-Readiness at the Global level and ranks them. Three countries appeared only in this rank (Algeria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia). The best level is the 46th out of 65 for Saudi Arabia in 2005 e-Readiness assessment as shown in the following table (EIU 2002, 2003, 2004and 2005).