ICTlogy

As in a pendulum movement, the reflections about the impact of ICTs in the Economy have swung from enthusiasm to realism and back to optimism, being each of these states really subjective and implying a wide range of shades within.

After a first period of cyberoptimism, people that “wanted to see” and people that thought “waiting to see” was a bad strategy because “it will then be too late”, followed a timespan where scientists — mainly economists — stuck to strict evidence from reality, being their main conclusion that the more you spend/invest in ICTs the more they affect both the share and the growth of the GDP — an obvious conclusion to many, I’d dare say, as it’ll happen with sweets if you spent half your national budget in candy.

In the last years, due to more data available and more and better analyses, we have been seeing new findings that, at last, seem to bring more light to the issue of the impact of ICTs on the Economy. In the following table I present a summary of a good bunch of such positive impacts. One caveat is due: as it is clarified in most of the documents listed below, evidence is not always subject to generalization. While sometimes it actually is, some findings apply only to specific contexts such as countries, economies, moments of time, constellations of conditions and so forth. I nevertheless believe that these impacts are worth listing because some were predicted — or expected — ten years or more before they could be measured. On the other hand, some caveats about the applicability of these findings are mainly based on (non) availability of data. Last, but not least, because even if some results only apply, as we have said, to specific economic setups, some of these setups could be reproduced in other contexts — e.g. in developing countries — in order to try to provide the same results.

Surprisingly — or not — there are few papers stating the negative impact of ICTs in the Economy. Some of them do not dare talking about negative impacts but of changes in the Economy: change of paradigm, organizational changes, turbulences in international markets, etc. and speak of them quite neutrally: they are neither positive nor negative on their own, but it will depend on a firm or a sector strength and position to benefit from them or to suffer them.

To be true, the only potential negative impact I have been able to find in economic papers — and also in sociological papers — is about employment. Again, a caveat: as I have shown before, most authors predict that the net effect on employment will be positive, and will be in the lines shown in the table. Nevertheless, some — among them Greenwood (1999) and Castells (2000) — picture some drawbacks of ICTs entering workers’ life. While the first one describes an impasse scenario where skilled workers will benefit while non-skilled will have to adapt to new technologies — losing productivity, competitiveness and earnings in the meanwhile — Castells is certainly more frightening, as he depicts the segmentation of workers in two axes: networked vs. switched-off labor, and self-programmable vs. generic labour. The conclusions are similar to Greenwood’s, but presumably to stay in the long run and with deeper consequences that spill from the labor market over the social and cultural arenas in a not really promising future for the switched-off and/or generic kind of workers.

References

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