This paper examines the roles of the ICT-producing sector and of key ICT-using industries in overall productivity growth in OECD countries. The ICT-producing sector provides a considerable contribution to productivity growth in several OECD countries and explains some of the pick-up in productivity growth in the United States in the second half of the 1990s. ICT manufacturing, in particular, has been characterised by very high rates of productivity growth in many countries. Some countries with a large ICT sector, such as Finland and Ireland, have experienced above-average multifactor productivity (MFP) growth in the second half of the 1990s. But some countries with a small ICT sector, such as Australia, have also observed rapid MFP growth, suggesting that a large ICT sector is no prerequisite for faster MFP growth. In some countries, notably Finland and the United States, certain ICT-using services have also experienced an above-average pick-up in productivity growth in the second half of the 1990s. This may indicate that ICT investment is having spillovers beyond the ICT sector itself. However, there is still insufficient evidence to attribute productivity improvements in these sectors directly to their use of ICT. Differences in the measurement of productivity in ICT-producing and -using industries across countries complicate the cross-country analysis. Considerable differences remain across countries in investment and uptake of ICT, which may be partly due to policy differences, including those related to competition and regulatory reform.
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