The impact of information technology on postwar US economic growth

Dale Jorgenson, Mun Ho and Jon D. Samuels

Telecommunications Policy, 2016, vol. 40, issue 5, 398-411

Abstract: We provide detailed information on the crucial role of information technology in the postwar growth of the U.S. economy, from the development of the telecommunications services and the telecommunications equipment industries through the successful commercialization of semiconductor technology and the ongoing shift to cloud-based IT services. Our industry-level data set reveals that productivity gains over the postwar period originated disproportionally in industries that produce IT, but the replication of established technologies through growth of capital and labor inputs explains by far the largest proportion of U.S. economic growth. We find that the substantial growth deceleration during the Great Recession was driven by modestly negative aggregate productivity growth, but that only a minor portion of the drop in the growth rate was due to the IT-producing industries.

Keywords: Information technology; US economy; Hardware and software; Productivity; Innovation; Replication (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308596115000336
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:telpol:v:40:y:2016:i:5:p:398-411

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/30471/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... /30471/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.telpol.2015.03.001

Access Statistics for this article

Telecommunications Policy is currently edited by Erik Bohlin

More articles in Telecommunications Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().