During the 1980s and into this decade, U.S. businesses poured
billions of dollars into computers and other information
technology. Yet the productivity performance of the U.S. economy in
the 1980s remained lackluster--especially in the service
sector--leading many observers to suspect that companies were not
getting their money's worth from these high-tech investments. At
the same time, academic research found little evidence of a
productivity payoff. But have the tables now turned? With an
apparent improvement in productivity in recent years, much academic
and popular opinion now suggests that the payback is at hand or
just around the corner.
As the nation embarks on a major effort to develop an
Information Superhighway, it is critical for policymakers, opinion
leaders, and others to understand the contribution and role of
information technology in the economy during recent decades. This
book provides a straightforward guide to the economic issues
underlying the debates about these issues, using quantitative and
historical analysis, supplemented with interviews of small and
large service-sector companies.
To set the stage, Daniel Sichel reviews the debates over the
role of computers and summarizes the essential facts about computer
use, with a particular emphasis on software. Going beyond basic
facts, Sichel describes an economic framework for assessing the
aggregate economic impact of computers in recent decades and for
looking ahead at this impact in the future. Quantitative estimates
from this framework, along with supporting historical and interview
evidence, place limits on the contribution of computers to the
overall economy. When compared to the size of the slowdown in
productivity growth in the early 1970s, the overall impact of
computers appears relatively modest, in part because the share of
computers in the nation's capital stock is surprisingly small.
Looking ahead, Sichel also raises questions as to whether computers
are likely to solve the nation's productivity woes in the
future.
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