VSHow can we explain the apparent lack of effect of the revolutions in information and communication technologies, and more recently artificial intelligence (AI), on productivity growth in developed countries? Particularly since the 2008 crisis, we have observed a slowdown in productivity growth in the United States and the European Union: over the period 2008-2022, hourly labor productivity would have been halved in the United States. and in the euro zone compared to the period 1990-2007 (“ Long-Term Productivity Database », Antonin Bergeaud, Gilbert Cet and Rémy Lecat).
A first explanation is that there would have been a secular decline in research productivity: more and more researchers would be needed to achieve a certain level of productivity growth or a certain volume of innovations. In particular, it takes eighteen times more researchers today to double the density of transistors on a chip than in the early 1970s. However, this explanation ignores the fact that beyond the increase in their transistor density, new chips are less expensive than old ones and can accomplish more tasks.
A second explanation is that we do not know how to measure productivity growth well. First, traditional measures of productivity and growth collide with the internationalization of global value chains. Secondly and above all, these measures struggle to account for the importance and growing variety of services in economies largely based on intangibles. Thus, over the last forty years, we have observed an acceleration of innovation in the United States, measured by the quantity of patents, but which has not been fully reflected in the evolution of productivity growth.
Appropriation time
A third explanation is that major technological revolutions take time to diffuse and therefore generate a visible increase in growth. The first steam engine was commercialized as early as 1712, but the acceleration in GDP per capita growth was only visible from 1830 in the United Kingdom. Likewise, while the electric light bulb was invented in 1879, it took more than fifty years before we observed an acceleration in productivity growth in the United States. Several factors explain this gap, notably the time it takes for households and businesses to appropriate the new technology, the time to develop secondary innovations which adapt the new technology to different sectors of the economy, or even the slowness of the decline the price of the new technology, which slows down its large-scale adoption.
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