This paper reviews the characteristics and magnitude of information technology (IT) outsourcing as well as studies its labor productivity effects with a representative sample of Finnish businesses. Depending on the IT task in question, on average from one-third to two-thirds of IT has been...

The missing effect of investments of firms in information and communication technologies on productivity is studied by various recent papers (e.g. Oliner and Sichels 1994, Landauer 1995, Brynjolfsson and Hitt 1996). Several explanations are given for this missing link. Our paper deals with two...

This paper examines how IT influences global sourcing decisions. It develops a theoretical model to study how IT determines the decisions of firms located in the high-wage North whether to offshore production to a low-wage country in the South. Offshoring to South however is subject to costly...

This paper explores potential channels through which information technology (IT) affects economic development. The channel emphasized here is the reduction of transaction costs through the use of information technology. We discuss the nature of transaction costs, their possible impacts on...

How can information technology (IT) contribute to rural development? What are the channels through which impacts can be realized, and what are the practical means for realizing potential benefits? This paper examines several ongoing projects that aim to provide IT-based services to rural...

This paper studies the impact of the early adoption of one of the most important high-technology machines in history, the public mechanical clock, on long-run growth in Europe. We avoid endo-geneity by considering the relationship between the adoption of clocks with an instrument based on the...