Productivity Slowdown and the Role of the ICT in Italy: A Firm Level Analysis

Carlo Milana and Alessandro Zeli
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Alessandro Zeli: ISTAT - National Statistical Institute

No 39, ISAE Working Papers from ISTAT - Italian National Institute of Statistics - (Rome, ITALY)

Abstract: This paper presents a firm-level analysis of the productivity slowdown that has been recently observed in Italy. DEA techniques are applied to the firm-level data collected within the annual surveys on the economic accounts of enterprises carried out by the Italian National Statistical Institute (ISTAT). TFP changes over the years 1996-1999 have been measured for 33 industries and have been decomposed into technological change (shift in the production frontier) and change in relative technical inefficiency (due to modifications in the distance of the single firms from the frontier). This decomposition has turned out to be helpful in interpreting the nature of the observed productivity slowdown. Econometric regressions of the firms' TFP changes on a number of variables, including a component factor correlated to ICT, reveal that the information and communication technologies may have a positive and significant impact on TFP in all examined industries during the period.

Keywords: ICT; Technical Efficiency; Productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D2 L2 O4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2003-12
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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