Nordhaus <http://www.econ.yale.edu/~nordhaus/homepage/prod_092402.pdf> and Gordon <http://faculty-web.at.northwestern.edu/economics/gordon/Productivity-Brookings.pdf> see several tech-using industries as major contributors to the productivity acceleration, notably retail (i.e., Wal-Mart) and finance (web trading). Those sectors are exempt from the critique of hedonic pricing.
Doug
Devine, James wrote:
> The economy's performance in the second half of the decade [the 1990s] was considerably better, but much of the acceleration in growth was simply due to increased depreciation-the output needed to replace worn out or obsolete equipment and software. Net domestic product (NDP)-the Commerce Department's measure of usable output-grew at a rate that was nearly half a percentage point less than the growth rate of GDP in the second half of the decade. In the boom years of the late nineties, NDP grew only slightly faster than it did in the seventies, and far below the rates of the fifties and sixties. <
from http://www.cepr.net/stock_market/new_economy_goes_bust.htm
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://myweb.lmu.edu/jdevine
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From: PEN-L list on behalf of Daniel Davies Sent: Sun 2/27/2005 10:24 PM To: PEN-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU Subject: Re: [PEN-L] article on oil & dollars
Jim do you have a reference for where Dean says this? It looks like a very important point, since one of the big things that happened around that time was the introduction of hedonic adjustment in the computer industry, and since it's always seemed to me that the flipside of what they were doing with hedonic adjustment of the price of new computers would have to be a reduction of the effective useful life of a computer.
best dd
-----Original Message----- From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Devine, James Sent: 28 February 2005 04:29 To: PEN-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU Subject: Re: article on oil & dollars
Dean Baker argues that US productivity growth has been exaggerated, since depreciation also sped up. If you adjust for the latter, US productivity growth doesn't look as good.
