information technology

The report from the California Council on Science and Technology provides an up-to-date perspective and analysis on numerous aspects of nanotechnology, including, among others, its economic impact; affected scientific disciplines; commercial best practices; workforce development issues and social and ethical issues.

The paper examines several ongoing projects that aim to provide information technology-based services to rural populations in India. The analysis highlights the common building blocks required for
successful implementation, and the relative strengths and weaknesses of different approaches.

Empirical results from the study confirm the existence of international ICT spillover and the pattern of such spillover for two distinguished economic groups. With reference to these findings, policies in regard to promoting knowledge flow and trade openness are discussed for economies to fully reap the benefits of the international ICT spillover effect.

The author develops a technology choices model where scarce scientific resources are alternatively allocated to basic science activities and to applied technology uses. Findings indicate that saddle path stability holds for a not too high intertemporal discount rate.

The paper develops an intertemporal optimization model in which the authors may control the theoretical knowledge frontier. The paper also develops an application of this framework.

The authors show that the use of imperfect performance measures can cause an agent to devote too many resources (too much effort) to acquiring information. They also analyze the impact of endogenous information acquisition on the optimal incentive strength and the quality of the performance measure used.

The quest for more efficiency and security is reflected in the economy as a whole, but especially in the product and process innovations in information and communication technology (ICT). The author examines the ten concepts considered to have the brightest prospects in the business segment in terms of their potential to gain widespread use during this decade. Out of these, the three most promising ICT approaches are biometrics, open-source software and radio tagging.

The authors study the location pattern
of new industries and how it changes over time. With this objective as motivation, a set of 27 industries are classified as belonging to the ICT-sector.

Rapid developments in information and communication technologies (ICT) and the increased use of ICT motivate the vision of an evolving digital economy. The author concentrates the analysis to one aspect of the digital economy, namely its effect of the system of functional urban regions.

Firm-specific variation in stock returns and fundamental performance measures is significantly higher in industries that have a history of more investment in information technology (IT). The authors hypothesize that IT is associated with creative destruction or product differentiation, either of which can widen the performance difference between winner and loser firms.