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ICT as a general-purpose technology: The productivity of ICT in the United States revisited

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-06-28, 09:13 authored by Hailin Liao, Bin Wang, Baibing LiBaibing Li, Thomas G. Weyman-Jones
Researchers have long been puzzled by ICT's (Information and Communication Technology) contributions towards (productivity) growth. This paper investigates and reveals the multi-facets of ICT productivity and the mechanism through which ICT affects productivity by bringing all the distinct streams of existing findings together. In particular, we develop a two-level frontier-efficiency model to examine how ICT's direct and indirect impact on different components of productivity is related to the economic growth in the US. Our empirical analysis has confirmed that ICT investment does contribute to productivity but not in the usual manner - we find a positive (but lagged) ICT effect on technological progress. We argue that for a positive ICT role on growth to actually take place, a period of negative relationship between productivity and ICT investment together with ICT-using sectors' capacity to learn from the embodied new technology was crucial. In addition, it took a learning period with appropriate complementary co-inventions for the new ICT-capital to become effective and its gains to be realized. Our findings provide solid, further empirical evidence to support ICT as a general purpose technology.

History

School

  • Business and Economics

Department

  • Business

Published in

Information Economics and Policy

Citation

LIAO, H. ...et al., 2016. ICT as a general-purpose technology: The productivity of ICT in the United States revisited. Information Economics and Policy, 36, pp. 10-25.

Publisher

© Elsevier

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2016-06-01

Notes

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Information Economics and Policy and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.infoecopol.2016.05.001

ISSN

0167-6245

Language

  • en