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Documents de travail du Département des Affaires économiques de l'OCDE

Documents de travail du Département des affaires économiques de l’OCDE recouvrant toutes les activités de ce département : conjoncture économique, analyse politique et projections ; politique fiscale, dépenses publiques et fiscalité ; questions structurelles dont le vieillissement, la croissance et la productivité, la migration, l’environnement, le capital humain, le logement, les échanges et les investissements, les marchés de l’emploi, la réforme réglementaire, la concurrence, la santé et d’autres thèmes.

Anglais, Français

Digitalisation and productivity: In search of the holy grail – Firm-level empirical evidence from EU countries

This paper assesses how the adoption of a range of digital technologies affects firm productivity. It combines cross-country firm-level data on productivity and industry-level data on digital technology adoption in an empirical framework that accounts for firm heterogeneity. The results provide robust evidence that digital adoption in an industry is associated to productivity gains at the firm level. Effects are relatively stronger in manufacturing and routine-intensive activities. They also tend to be stronger for more productive firms and weaker in presence of skill shortages, which may relate to the complementarities between digital technologies and other forms of capital (e.g. skills, organisation, or intangibles). As a result, digital technologies may have contributed to the growing dispersion in productivity performance across firms. Hence, policies to support digital adoption should go hand in hand with creating the conditions to enable the catch-up of lagging firms, notably by easing access to skills.

Anglais

Mots-clés: productivity, ICT, skills, digitalisation, cloud computing, high-speed internet
JEL: O33: Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth / Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights / Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes; D24: Microeconomics / Production and Organizations / Production; Cost; Capital; Capital, Total Factor, and Multifactor Productivity; Capacity; J24: Labor and Demographic Economics / Demand and Supply of Labor / Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
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