Technological sources of productivity growth in Japan, the U.S. and Germany: What makes the difference?

This paper studies the contribution of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) on economic growth and labor productivity across the three leading economies in the world: Japan, Germany and the US. We use a dynamic general equilibrium growth model with investment-specific technological change to quantify the contribution to productivity growth in the three countries from different technological progress. We find that contribution to productivity growth due to ICT capital assets is about 0.40 percentage points for Japan and Germany, whereas it is about 0.65 percentage points in the case of the US. Neutral technological change is the main source of productivity growth in Japan and Germany. For the US, the main source of productivity growth derives from investment-specific technological change, mainly associated to ICT.