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Measuring and Sustaining the New Economy Report of a Workshop (2002) / Chapter Skim
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Panel I: Defining and Measuring the New Economy
Pages 44-49

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From page 44...
... He said that the topic holds special interest for him and for his office, the Economics and Statistics Administration of the Department of Commerce, which oversees two of the nation's three major statistical agencies, notably the Bureau of the Census and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. He said that the challenge of measuring the New Economy has proven to be a difficult one: "It really is a process of calibrating and recalibrating our understanding of new technologies and new measures in order to slowly construct a picture that makes sense to us and corresponds to the parameters of statistics." A Critical Question for U.S.
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From page 45...
... 2. Disinflationary forces that have held back price pressures for more than a decade, including more intense competition associated with deregulation and expanding world trade, shifts to tight fiscal policies at home and abroad, and the falling prices of information technology itself.
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From page 46...
... In fact, it is the particular character of information technology innovation that may best define what is new about the New Economy. Many of these technologies have qualities that seem to make a real economic difference.
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From page 47...
... Cascading Innovation Finally, as industries apply information technology to their businesses, economists see evidence of what might be called cascading innovation. Productivity gains come not just from faster processing of information but also from changes in the way a firm operates and from additional technological advances made possible by the information technology.
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From page 48...
... Nevertheless, within the high-growth information technology sector itself, the Department of Commerce expects employment in the information technology industry to grow 40 percent over the next 8 to 10 years. It also expects the number of workers in core information technology fields, today roughly 2.4 million computer scientists, engineers, systems analysts, and programmers, to nearly double.
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From page 49...
... One is a wide discrepancy between the department's greatly improved measures of output in the information technology sector itself and the less effective way it measures the improvement of output when information technology is used in other sectors. The second is that the network model constituted a serious challenge to traditional ways of measuring firm establishment and might require new concepts for capturing the locus of economic activity in the network world.
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Key Terms

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  • expanding world
  • competition associated
  • statistical agencies
  • produces durable

  • inflation rose
  • expects employment
  • gains associated
  • sector reflects
  • model constituted

  • outsources virtually
  • postwar period
  • major statistical
  • record seven
  • symposium speaker

  • product design
  • cited robert
  • faster processing
  • technological basis
  • wide discrepancy


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