The Productivity impact of E-Commerce in the UK, 2001: Evidence from microdata

This paper considers the impact of e-commerce on establishment level productivity for all sectors of the economy, using data from the UK E-commerce survey. E-Commerce represents the operational application of technology in the production process and may be regarded as an innovation driven change in workplace practice.

Using a production function approach to measuring productivity, we find that OLS estimation fails to adequately account for the selectivity bias amongst enterprises that use e-commerce. Using a treatment effect estimator, we find that both e-buying and e-selling have significant and positive impacts on productivity.