Sectoral Structure and the Digital Era. Conceptual and Empirical Analysis
The rapid adoption of digital technologies is leading to structural changes in the business and economic environment putting pressure on the ability of industrial classifications to capture the structure of an economy. To understand the impact of these new technologies in the economy we first outline six major underlying processes in this phase of development. They are: increasing pervasiveness of digitalization; production processes v products under digitalization; specialization; diversification; organizational innovation linked to the dichotomy internalization v externalization of activities; and, for digital products, non-spatial coincidence between the location of equipment/infrastructure and the location of production. The case of Amazon is discussed in relation to the above processes