The Economic Impact of ICT With

Post 1995 the EU experienced a productivity growth gap compared to the US. A substantial part of this gap was due to stronger productivity growth in the US Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) production and market service sectors. This phenomenon was inspiration for research on the economic impact of ICT by John Van Reenen (et al). The increased economic importance of ICT raised new questions for governments regarding the best policy frameworks to adopt for encouraging both ICT investment and ICT-led innovation. The report provides new evidence on these questions. The majority of the report is rooted in a “micro-to-macro” approach that utilises a large-scale, cross-country firm-level database on ICT and productivity. This database is used to provide the reports main findings on productivity, ICT adoption, innovation and globalisation. The report finds extensive complementarities between ICT and organisational capital. The key to making more effective use of ICT in Europe therefore to