Sectoral Productivity in the United States: Recent Developments and the Role of IT

As the step-up in U.S. productivity growth in the mid-1990s became evident, research on productivity surged. Initially, the new work concentrated on estimating the contribution of information technology (IT) to the productivity pickup, with similar results obtained using industry-level or broad macroeconomic time-series data (Jorgenson and Stiroh 2000, Oliner and Sichel 2000, respectively). Later, studies exploited more detailed data and showed that, while multi-factor productivity (MFP) growth in the IT-producing industries was very high, many services industries also had substantial MFP growth in the late 1990s (Triplett and Bosworth 2004; Jorgenson, Ho, and Stiroh 2005a, 2005b).