Indigenous Innovation during the IT Revolution: We Never Had It So Good?

The extended time span of the data that we use allows us to compare trends in productivity across countries and, most importantly, across very different time periods, from the pre-WWI era, to the period between the two world wars, to the post-WWII decades, to the years of the IT revolution. Our methodological approach enables us to recover the network through which indigenous innovation shocks propagate across the world and how the associated network structure changed from one era to the next. In this chapter, we focus on indigenous innovation and, in turn, productivity growth during the IT revolution. First, we