The impact of information technology on postwar US economic growth

We provide detailed information on the crucial role of information technology in the postwar growth of the U.S. economy, from the development of the telecommunications services and the telecommunications equipment industries through the successful commercialization of semiconductor technology and the ongoing shift to cloud-based IT services. Our industry-level data set reveals that productivity gains over the postwar period originated disproportionally in industries that produce IT, but the replication of established technologies through growth of capital and labor inputs explains by far the largest proportion of U.S. economic growth. We find that the substantial growth deceleration during the Great Recession was driven by modestly negative aggregate productivity growth, but that only a minor portion of the drop in the growth rate was due to the IT-producing industries.