How Much Does IT Consumption Matter
for Growth?
Evidence from National Accounts

La letteratura sulla new economy sinora ha prestato scarsa at­tenzione all'adozione di prodotti informatici da parte delle famiglie, trascurando una parte considerevole della crescita economica riconducibile alle ICT.
Questo studio fa luce su questo aspetto mediante un'analisi di growth accounting, mostrando come l'Europa, ad eccezione di Danimarca e Regno Unito, abbia tratto dal consumo high-tech un beneficio minore rispetto agli Stati Uniti. Nel complesso, poi, il divario tra queste due regioni nella dinamica di sviluppo risulta largamente dipendente dal differente grado di utilizzo delle ICT, sia per scopi di produzione che di consumo.

The literature on the new economy has thus far paid little attention to households' adoption of Information Technologies, leaving unassessed a sizeable part of the IT-led growth.
This work fills such a gap carrying out a growth accounting analysis on a wide group of EU countries and the US. It shows that, aside from Denmark and UK, Europe has benefited from a smaller growth contribution from IT consumption than the US.
Overall, the divergence in the dynamic pattern of growth between these two regions results widely dependent on a different application of ICT, both for production and consumption purposes. [JEL Codes: E21, E22, O3, O4]

*venturini@dea.unian.it
The author wishes to thank for the provision of data the representatives for household consumption expenditure at various Na­tional Statistical Offices: Thomas Schachl (Austria), Olli Pirinen (Finland), Michael Burghardt (Germany), Ylva Petersson (Sweden). He is also grateful to Nadim Ah-mad (OECD), Kurt Kratena (WIFO, Austria), Katarina Andersson (SCB, Sweden) for Input-Output tables and Colin Webb for unpublished OECD STAN series. The author benefited from the suggestions provided by Andrea Ciffolilli, Eleonora Cutri-ni, Nicola Matteucci, Mary O'Mahony, Claudio Socci, Alessandro Sterlacchini and the participants to EPKE final conference on "Information Technology, Produc-tivity and Growth" (London, 27-28 October 2004). Usual disclaimers apply.