ICTs and Productivity

Here is a paper I wrote on the subject of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and Productivity.

The full version of this paper is available in PDF format [114 KB].

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Back in 1987, the New York Review of Books (NYRB) magazine quoted Robert Solow saying “you can see the computer age everywhere, except in the productivity statistics”. The sentence was related to what Solow was working on, as a member of the MIT’s Commission on Industrial Productivity.
In 1989, the book “Made in America: Regaining the Productive Edge ”, by Solow, Michael Dertouzos, Richard Lester and the MIT Commission, helped to reiterate that idea. The numbers showed higher multi-factor productivity growth (gMFP) and higher labour productivity growth (gLP) from 1948 to 1973, relatively to what was measured after, the after being the years when the computer industry boomed.

From 1948 to 1973, the average U.S. gMFP and gLP were, respectively, 1.9% and 2.9%; from 1974 to 1997, the same values were 0.2% and 1.1%. This slowdown is also observed in most OECD industrialized countries.

Because the slowdown coincides with the rapid increase in the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), it suggests to some researchers a negative correlation between the economywide productivity and the ICTs.
One early paper with such interpretation is Roach[ ], where the author compares information workers (white collars) with production workers (blue collars), and measures that in the period from 1975 to 1986, the output per information worker decreased 6%, while the output per production worker increased 6.6%, concluding to “have isolated America’s productivity shortfall and shown it to be concentrated in that portion of the Economy that is the largest employer of white collars”…

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