This paper uses previously unavailable historical records to show that several assumptions central to a learning by doing explanation of productivity growth in the construction of Liberty ships during World War II are mistaken. Impressive increases in output per worker recorded at one of the...

This paper describes work carried out at the University of York; its contents do not represent the views or opinions of BT. It provides an example of how insights into the field of IS can be gained by looking at it from the perspective of other academic disciplines. Based on the idea that...

In this paper, we survey some of the developments in India’s IT sector, and prospects for broad-based growth led by this sector. We examine the IT sector, discussing the role of software versus hardware, the growth pattern of the software industry and software exports, and the potential...

The System Dynamics methodology is used in this article as unifying approach in order to show how a number of theories about the performance of territories developed in the past 20 years can integrate the one with the other; to demonstrate this, a model of local economy coherent with these...

In most OECD countries, the business services industry has grown much faster than the market sector as a whole. The industry in most cases, however, has displayed stagnating productivity growth, in some periods even a fall in productivity. Does this fast-growing industry with a bad productivity...

This work attempts to shed light on the “information technology productivity paradox”. Employing a large data set of Italian manufacturing firms we compute ICT marginal productivity across different cluster of firms and the impact of information and communication technology (ICT) on output...

The Malmquist productivity index has many attractive features. One is that it decomposes into a technical efficiency change index and a technical change index. Under constant returns to scale, its technical efficiency change index has been decomposed into a "pure" technical efficiency change...

The contribution of new technology to economic growth can only be realized when and if the new technology is widely diffused and used. Diffusion itself results from a series of individual decisions to begin using the new technology, decisions which are often the result of a comparison of the...

Views of the future China vary widely. While some believe that the collapse of China is inevitable, others see the emergence of a new superpower that increasingly poses a threat to the U.S. This paper examines the economic growth prospects of China over the next two decades. Extrapolating past...

This paper explores the possibility that unregulated FDI flows are causally implicated in the decline in labor productivity growth in semi- industrialized economies. These effects are hypothesized to operate through the negative impact of firm mobility on worker bargaining power and thus...