The Economics of Information Technology Explaining the Productivity Paradox

ISBN: 9781330427927 出版年：2016 页码：26 Geoffrey M Brooke Forgotten Books

The past forty years have seen dramatic advances in the technology of information processing, and its widespread adoption bears testimony to the advent of the 'information society'. However, the economic implications of this transition remain to some degree obscure, since there is little evidence that the new technology has led to clear improvements in productive efficiency. Indeed, during the past twenty years the United States' economy has suffered from a declining rate of productivity growth, despite sharply accelerating investment in computer-based systems.Several attempts have been made to resolve this 'productivity paradox', yet none has proved entirely satisfactory. In this work, we propose a new explanation of the paradox, and present economic evidence in its support. The central argument is that information technology has altered the economies of production in favor of differentiated output, and that our methods of productivity measurement tend to discount the benefits of greater product variety. The validity of this reasoning is demonstrated by an empirical study of the United States' private economy, covering the forty-year period from 1950 to 1989. Despite these results, however, we conclude that declining productivity growth is not merely an accounting fiction, since our current economic system is relatively ill-suited to differentiated production.