Linking ICT related Innovation Adoption and Productivity
E-business systems are increasingly considered as important examples of ICT related innovations embodied in software applications, the adoption of which is essential for capturing the fruits of several ICT externalities. Using a rich set of cross-country-industry data constructed and tailored by Distributed Micro Data Analysis (DMD), we analyse the adoption of three e-business systems: Enterprise Resource Planning, Customer Relationship Management and Supply Chain Management.
We investigate the complementarities in joint adoption and the productivity effects of adopting systems simultaneously or in isolation. The same exercise is repeated on firm-level data for the Netherlands. Today, the econometric analysis based on firm-level data is often more advanced and more complicated from an econometric point of view than the analysis on aggregated data. Our example illustrates that international benchmarking with more elaborate models on cross-country-industry panel data is feasible after using DMD to tailor the underlying firm-level data for specific research questions. This is an important result in the light of the restrictions on pooling cross-country micro data due to confidentiality rules.
