Which Role for ICTs as a Productivity Driver Over the Last Years and the Next Future?

This paper deals with the role of ICTs in the recent productivity slowdown, and with their possible future impact on productivity in developed countries: the United States (US), the Euro Area (EA), the United Kingdom (UK) and Japan. Few papers analyze the recent slowdown of the ICT contribution to productivity growth, and these papers, which concern only the US, disagree, as it will be stressed, on some important aspects. Some of the main outputs of our analysis are the following: i) A dramatic productivity slowdown has happened in the U.S. and other developed areas since the early 2000s; ii) This productivity slowdown seems to be at least partly linked to a decrease of ICT, and more precisely of chip performance gains, and to the end of the ICT increasing diffusion as a factor of production; iii) A growing attention given by chip producers to reduce heat (or, in other words, power consumption) could have contributed to the chip performance (in terms of clock speed) slowdown; iv) Some big ICT improvements will happen in the future, the next operational probably being the 3D chip; v) Large productivity gains could also be generated from an extension of the use of available chip capacities in a lot of areas, since 2005 this development being called by ITRS the 'More than Moore' process; vi) Benefits from technological changes and from the 'More than Moore' process will partly depend on institutional appropriate changes, for example concerning regulations on the labor and product markets.