Carlo Milana (Istituto di Studi e Analisi Economica), Alessandro Zeli

Productivity Slowdown and the Role of the ICT in Italy: A Firm-Level Analysis

This paper presents a firm-level analysis of the productivity slowdown that has been recently observed in Italy. DEA techniques are applied to the firm-level data collected within the annual surveys on the economic accounts of enterprises carried out by the Italian National Statistical Institute (ISTAT). TFP changes over the years 1966-1999 have been measured for 33 industries and have been decomposed into technological change (shift in the production frontier) and change in relative technical inefficiency (due to modifications in the distance of the single firms from the frontier). This decomposition has turned out to be helpful in interpreting the nature of the observed productivity slowdown. Econometric regressions of the firms' TFP changes on a number of variables, including a component factor correlated to ICT, reveal that the information and communication technologies may have had a positive and significant impact on TFP in all industries during the examined period.

Keywords: ICT, Technical efficiency, Productivity

JEL Codes: D2, L2, O4

Session: 5b   Room 2001   Category: ICT 2

Paper