ICT and Europe's productivity performance: Industry-level growth account comparisons with the United States

In this paper we present a new industry-level database to analyze sources of growth in four major European countries: France, Germany, Netherlands and the United Kingdom (EU-4), in comparison with the United States for the period 1979-2000. Aggregate labor productivity growth is decomposed into industry-level contributions of labor quality, ICT and non-ICT capital deepening and TFP. A small set of service industries is mainly responsible for the acceleration in ICT capital deepening in both regions, but their contribution to growth is lower in the EU-4 than in the U.S. TFP in these ICT-intensive services accelerated in the U.S. in the 1990s, but not in Europe. In addition, widespread deceleration in non-ICT capital deepening in the EU-4 has led to a European labor productivity slowdown.