The Resurgence of Growth in the Late 1990s: Is Information Technology the Story?

By Stephen D. Oliner, Daniel Sichel. 2000

2,065 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The performance of the U.S. economy over the past several years has been remarkable, including a rebound in labor productivity growth after nearly a quarter century of sluggish gains. To assess the role of information technology in the recent rebound, this paper re-examines the growth contribution of computers and related inputs with the same neoclassical framework that we have used in earlier work. ; Our results indicate that the contribution to productivity growth from the use of information technology - including computer hardware, software, and communication equipment - surged in the second half of the 1990s. In addition, technological advance in the production of computers appears to have contributed importantly to the speed-up in productivity growth. All in all, we estimate that the use of information technology and the production of computers accounted for about two-thirds of the 1 percentage point step-up in productivity growth between the first and second halves of the decade. Thus, to answer the question posed in the title of this paper, information technology largely is the story.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Media Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e265e55240fe5cfb406718ec56b215027e8e5eb5

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Citations in the corpus

Are ICT Spillovers Driving the New Economy (2002, methodology): “ICT in a Neoclassical Model The standard neoclassical model is”
The Effects of Technical Change on Labor Market Inequalities (2004, positive): “Hence, capital-embodied productivity improvements can be the source of factor-biased technical progress.”
Steam as a General Purpose Technology: A Growth Accounting Perspective (2004, neutral): “In the variant proposed in the well-known paper by Oliner and Sichel (2000), capital is divided into three types of ICT capital (computer hardware, computer software and telecom equipment) and other capital each of which is weighted by its own factor income share.”
The Productivity of Information Technology Investments: New Evidence from IT Labor Data (2012, methodology): “In Table 11, we show the results of a total factor productivity (TFP) decomposition, a growth analysis that has been used in earlier IT productivity research to measure the contribution of different inputs to growth (e.g., see Oliner and Sichel 2000, Brynjolfsson and Hitt 2003).”
What's Driving the New Economy?: The Benefits of Workplace Innovation (2003, positive): “Recent work by Oliner and Sichel (2000) and Jorgenson and Stiroh (2001) find that a great deal”
Information Technology and the U.S. Productivity Revival: What Do the Industry Data Say? (2002, methodology): “The first force is gains in the production of IT, measured as accelerating TFP growth in the IT-producing This accounted for about 25% of the approximately 1 percentage point acceleration 5 to both Jorgenson and Stiroh (2000) and Oliner and Sichel (2000).”
International Comparisons of Productivity Growth: The Role of Information Technology and Regulatory Practices (2002, background): “In contrast, countries where spending on information technologies fell or only picked up marginally did not 2 See, for example, Gordon (2000), Oliner and Sichel (2000), Jorgenson and Stiroh (2000), and US Council of Economic Advisors (2001).”
A guide to the use of chain aggregated NIPA data (2000, methodology): “In fact, using growth accounting techniques, Jorgenson and Stiroh (2000), Oliner and Sichel (2000), and Whelan (2000) have all concluded that the high-tech sector has been central to the acceleration in productivity since the mid-1990s.”