Evaluation of electronic public services in agriculture in the Czech Republic

Abstract

The goals of the paper are to analyze the uptake and to evaluate the quality of electronic public services among Czech agricultural enterprises. A sample of 119 entrepreneurs in the agriculture from diff erent regions in the Czech Republic was chosen. This research is based on the application of scientifi c analysis, synthesis and deduction. Descriptive statistics were calculated from the data obtained in the questionnaire survey. There were fi fteen diff erent electronic services examined in the survey. Respondents made a plain ordinal-scaled evaluation of all used services in terms of the frequency of use, usefulness, importance and quality. Working hypotheses about dependencies among rates of use of particular services and fi ve factors (plant production, animal raising, hectares of land, number of employees, subsidies) were examined with regression analysis. Eleven statistically signifi cant dependencies were proved between the number of hectares and electronic services, which means that with growing number of hectares of land the rate of use of particular electronic services increases. Electronic services provided at eAGRI Portal run by Czech Ministry of Agriculture were utilized the most among agricultural enterprises (each by more than 50 %) and electronic mail (79 %). eAGRI Portal services were assessed the best in terms of importance, usefulness and quality. Farmers and agricultural businesses in the Czech Republic are currently not obliged by any law to use any electronic service, and they can still opt for traditional paper mail or personal visit.