Productivity growth and technological change in Europe and us

This paper presents an evaluation on the technological sources of productivity growth across European countries and the U.S. for the period 1980-2004. Technological progress is divided into neutral change and investment specific change. Contribution to productivity growth from each type of technological progress is computed using a growth accounting approach and a general equilibrium approach. Concerning the growth accounting view, the neutral change dominates the effect from the implicit change, and the ICT assets provide most of the implicit technological change. Regarding the general equilibrium approach, ICT assets (specially the hardware equipment) also respond for most of the implicit change affecting productivity growth.