IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wej/wldecn/56.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Is the Internet Better than Electricity?

Author

Listed:
  • Martin Brookes
  • Zaki Wahhaj

Abstract

This article looks at the economic impact of electrification in the United States to gain insights about the possible consequences of today’s information technologies. A close study reveals that electrification significantly raised productivity growth by spurring a redesign of the optimal factory but, strikingly, neither the firms producing the new technology, nor those using it, were able to increase their share of profits in GDP. The authors conclude that even in the unlikely event that the internet and IT matches electricity in economic terms, the only unambiguous beneficiaries would probably be consumers who are able to enjoy lower prices of goods and services and newer products.

Suggested Citation

  • Martin Brookes & Zaki Wahhaj, 2001. "Is the Internet Better than Electricity?," World Economics, World Economics, 1 Ivory Square, Plantation Wharf, London, United Kingdom, SW11 3UE, vol. 2(2), pages 53-72, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:wej:wldecn:56
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.worldeconomics.com/Journal/Papers/Article.details?ID=56
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Crafts, Nicholas, 2002. "The Solow Productivity Paradox in Historical Perspective," CEPR Discussion Papers 3142, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    2. Bayoumi, Tamim & Haacker, Markus, 2002. "It's Not What You Make, It's How You Use IT: Measuring the Welfare Benefits of the IT Revolution Across Countries," CEPR Discussion Papers 3555, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wej:wldecn:56. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Ed Jones (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.