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

The literature on the new economy has thus far paid little attention to households’ adoption of Information Technologies, leaving un-assessed a sizeable part of the IT-led growth. This work fills such a lack 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.