Sources of productivity growth and convergence in ict industries: an intertemporal non-parametric frontier approach?

The present work decomposes labour productivity growth in ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) sector in a set of given countries with the aim of identifying the relevance of localized innovation, capital intensification and catching up. The appropriate technology theory proposed by Basu & Weil (1998) extended with non-immediate spillovers (Los & Timmer, 2005) is the theoretical framework used. Decomposition of productivity growth is carried out from a non-parametric frontier approach following Maudos et al. (2000a) and Kumar & Russell (2002). The present work is also supplemented with kernel convergence analysis, which allows comparing growth paces in countries under study.