Over the past decades, the majority of information and communication technology (ICT) products have undergone rapid technical change. To the extent that such technical progress benefits consumers and users, quality improvements should be reflected in official price and quantity indices. When...

This STI Working Paper deals with this group of rapidly expanding firms. It does so by placing the discussion into a context of entrepreneurship, arguing that there are two main aspects to this notion: one of business start-ups and market entry, and another one of innovation. Evidence is based...

This paper deals with the contribution of information and communication technology (ICT) to economic growth and to labour and multi-factor productivity. It uses a well-established growth accounting framework to assess the role of ICTs as capital inputs and the contribution of these capital...

High and rising unemployment rates in the early 1990s have moved the employment question centrestage in the policy debate. Among the structural aspects, the relation between firm size and employment creation has attracted policy makers’ attention, triggered by empirical work on the United...

Short-term economic indicators play an important role in the assessment of current cyclical situations and in the establishment of forecasts. Broadly, two types of short-term indicators can be distinguished: qualitative indicators, reflecting businessmen’s subjective assessment of the cyclical...

This paper examines how measurement problems affect international comparisons of labour productivity. It suggests that these measurement problems do not significantly affect the assessment of aggregate productivity patterns in the OECD area. However, these problems do influence the more detailed...