The impact of the information and communication technologies on productivity:Case of Turkey

The emergence and intensive utilization of information and communication technologies (ICTs), which spawned the beginning of the digitization two decades ago, drive economic prosperity and sustained long-term productivity growth. The spread of ICT generates economic growth because it incurs a reduction in interaction costs, expansion of information flows and market boundaries. In other words, countries with limited ICT infrastructure encounter several economic problems such as limited information flows, overpriced cost of interaction, reduced market opportunities and thus low incomes. Therefore, technological developments have generated considerable interest among academics and practitioners in recent years. In recent decades, ınformation and communication technologies for instance computer terminals, e-mail and the ınternet and their applications have become the major drivers of innovation, growth and social change. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of information and communications technologies (ICT) on productivity. In this regard, this study is composed of two different economic models. First model aims to provide a country study of Turkey with respect to the impact of ICT on the productivity. At the end of the estimation, long term significant statistical relationship is found between information and communication technology and productivity in accordance with the literature. Second model empirically measures the impact of information and communication technology on productivity of selected OECD countries including Turkey. As a conclusion it is found that information and communication technology has positive and statistically significant effect on productivity in selected OECD countries.