[CAnet - news] The Internet as an economic General Purpose Technology (GPT)

[I highly recommend a recently published book "ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATIONS: 
General Purpose Technologies and Long Term Economic Growth".  One of the
questions that often challenges policy makers is the role of government in
terms of the ongoing evolution of the Internet for example as in broadband
deployment, Internet research, etc . If the Internet is just a "product"
like automobiles or vacuum cleaners then the role of government is pretty
minimal. However if the Internet is a transformative general purpose
technology whose impact touches all aspects of society as described this
book then the public sector role is more important. The authors of the book
list the Internet as number 20 of the 24 General Purpose Technologies
throughout human history. Some excerpts from Rickard Lipsey's web site --
BSA]

http://www.sfu.ca/~rlipsey/res.html


ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATIONS: 
General Purpose Technologies and Long Term Economic Growth
Richard G. Lipsey, Kenneth I. Carlaw, and Clifford T. Bekar

 

Available now through all good bookshops, or direct from Oxford University
Press at: 
URL: http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-929089-X


This book examines the long term economic growth that has raised the West's
material living standards to levels undreamed of by counterparts in any
previous time or place. The authors argue that this growth has been driven
by technological revolutions that have periodically transformed the West's
economic, social and political landscape over the last 10,000 years and
allowed the West to become, until recently, the world's only dominant
technological force.
Unique in the diversity of the analytical techniques used, the book begins
with a discussion of the causes and consequences of economic growth and
technological change. The authors argue that long term economic growth is
largely driven by pervasive technologies now known as General Purpose
(GPTs). 

[...]
These are pervasive technologies that provide new research agendas to apply
them across the whole economy, as did the steam engine, the electric dynamo,
and the computer.

Technological changes run the whole gamut from continuous, small,
incremental changes, through discontinuous radical inventions, to occasional
ones that evolve to pervade the entire the economy. These latter ones are
called General Purpose Technologies (GPTs). (This is a somewhat narrower,
and more tightly defined concept than those of 'disruptive' or
'transforming' technologies, which include GPTs but more.)  Typically, GPTs
begin as fairly crude technologies with a limited number of uses, but they
evolve into much more complex technologies with dramatic increases in the
range of their use across the economy and in the range of economic outputs
that they help produce.

...
Adapting to them effectively, typically requires major changes in government
policies and in the whole structure of the economy (what we call the
'facilitating structure'), which includes: 
o	human capital and where people live;
o	the physical organisation of production facilities, including labour
practices; 
o	the managerial and financial organisation of firms; 
o	the geographical location of productive activities; 
o	industrial concentration; 
o	infrastructure;  
o	private-sector financial institutions, and financial instruments; 
o	educational practices.

-----------
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www.canarie.ca/~bstarn
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