produtividade / BURSTS OF TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION

Our nation has had previous concentrated bursts of technological innovation. In those instances, business practices slowly adapted to take advantage of the new technologies. The result was an outsized increase in the level of productivity spread over a decade or two, with unusually rapid growth rates during the transition to the higher level.

For example, as the benefits that attended the development of the electric dynamo and the internal combustion engine more than a century ago became manifest in both the capital stock and the organization of production, the growth of labor productivity surged. From an average annual rate of 1-3/4 percent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it jumped to a 3-3/4 percent rate in the decade following World War I. Subsequently, productivity growth returned to a 1-3/4 percent pace. Then, for the quarter century following World War II, productivity growth rose to an average rate of 2-3/4 percent before subsiding to a pace of 1-1/2 percent annually from the mid-1970's to the mid-1990's.

Arguably, the pickup in productivity growth since 1995 largely reflects the ongoing incorporation of innovations in computing and communications technologies into the capital stock and business practices. Indeed, the transition to the higher permanent level of productivity associated with these innovations is likely not yet completed.