The Aggregate Production Efficiency of IT Investment: a Non-Linear Approach

The rapid diffusion of information and telecommunication (IT) technologies during the recent decennia produced fundamental changes in the economic activity at a global level, resulting in what became coined as the "new economy". However, empirical evidence on the contribution of IT equipment to growth and productivity is at best mixed, with the more or less consistent results on the positive link between the two relating to the United States in the 1990-s. Although the empirical literature on the link between IT investment and economic performance employs a wide variety of methodologies, the overwhelming majority of the studies appears to be employing the assumption of linearity of the IT-performance relationship and predominantly explores the direct nature thereof. In this study we relax both these assumptions and find that the indirect, or aggregate productive efficiency, effects of IT investment are as important as are the direct ones The estimated non-linear nature of the indirect relationship between IT investment intensity and productive efficiency accommodates the concepts of critical mass and complementary (infrastructure) capital offered in the literature. Our key finding is that the world economy′s average level of IT investment intensity remained below the estimated critical mass. Since in this study we developed a methodology that allows one to explicitly measure the critical mass of IT investment intensity, its individual estimation at a country or industrialsector level may help evaluate the extent to which IT investment activity has to be encouraged or discouraged.