ICT Research, the New Economy, and the Evolving Discipline of Economics: Back to the Future?

Economics-related ICT research has moved from the fringes of the discipline to penetrate all of its branches. It is, therefore, not a separate economics subdiscipline. It is also unlikely to become part of an “ICT or Internet research” proto-discipline. Instead, it should be seen as only one part of a bigger agenda toward a proper “information and knowledge economics” and possibly a future proto-discipline of a “unified theory of information and knowledge” or a meta-discipline of information sciences.

Keywords:

• general-purpose technology
• ICT
• information economy
• Internet
• knowledge(-based) economy
• New Economy
• unified theory of information and knowledge

Notes

1. To save a lengthy discussion, the terms information and knowledge are used more or less synonymously in this article. The relationship between the information economy and the knowledge(-based) economy is a vexing question beyond the scope of this article.

2. This example is not meant to defend the methodological approach of using “information inputs” in conventional economic analysis. The topic is contested territory and beyond the scope of this article. On ICT growth accounting, see Stiroh (2003) and the references cited therein.

3. There are exceptions to this narrowing in scope, but they are outside the mainstream (see, e.g., Potts, 2003).

4. The importance of ICT for economic growth, not only in the United States, but also in other developed and newly industrialized countries, is being documented by an increasing number of authors. The findings for developing countries are usually more mixed (see, e.g., Pohjola, 2001).

5. One also realizes that relatively little of this has as yet been reflected in the programs of past Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conferences.

6. However, he does comment that possible dimensions of the NE can “range from e-commerce, e-government, the Internet, the productivity paradox, knowledge-intensive work, social mass-mobilization, and globalization, all the way through auction proliferation, electronic payment systems, venture capital financing saturation, and business restructuring” (Quah, 2003, p. 291).

7. General-purpose technologies are technologies that greatly affect a wide range of sectors of an economy. See Helpman (1998) for more precise definitions of the term.

8. See, for example, the introduction to Jones (2003).

9. See Engelbrecht (2004) for an evaluation of Foray (2004).

10. However, some prominent NE analysts, like Shapiro and Varian (1999, pp. 39, 40), never doubted that “technology changes, but economic laws do not.” For a more differentiated view, see Engelbrecht (2003). Whether economic features such as increasing returns, lock-in, and network effects associated with ICT will eventually replace more standard economic assumptions is, in the end, an empirical question. For the foreseeable future, ICT will transform some industries more than others.

11. I thank a referee for mentioning this possibility.