IT productivity paradox: present state of research in the world and in Russia

In the early '80s the problem of return to IT investment was raised. For over a decade numerous analysts working on this problem found no positive payback of IT investment. Meanwhile, the early '90s saw new theoretical approaches, considering not only technology itself but a whole complex of IT and organizational practices as well as new skills and human capital motivation. At the same time new statistical data became available, both collected by researchers themselves and obtained from large business databases on IT usage in American and other firms. Using these new approaches and data, economists obtained new results confirming positive IT impact on firm's productivity. Firstly, they assessed the production function where the capital was divided into two categories: computer capital and the other one. The coefficient of computer capital, which proved to be positive and significant, allowed to measure directly the impact of computer capital on production and productivity. Secondly, complementary relations between different kinds of capital were investigated in a variety of ways. There is an interesting investigation method using the so-called Tobin's Q ratio, which stands for quotient of firm's market capitalization to its accounting valuation. According to this approach, Q<1 means that market estimates some firm's assets lower than the same assets accounting valuation, Q>1 means that some assets valued by the market are not reflected in account books. Q regression analysis across multiple firms revealed that complementary investment in computer, organizational and human capital strongly impacts the firm capitalization. In 2010-2012 and later on a Russian investigators team formed by MIPTIC used Russian firms' data in a similar research and also succeeded to draw IT positive impact on productivity. In order to do this, the group compiled the Russian firms' IT expenses database, which was first of the kind in Russia. The investigation methodology was considerably modified in two areas. Firstly, computer capital was calculated in a way incorporating kinds of computer capital that firms employed but former investigation methods missed. Secondly, Russian firms' accounting data did not match American ones, so the methodology was adapted to these discrepancies. The results again evidently demonstrated the IT investments positive impact on productivity. Empirical analysis of complementary relations within the total complex became another topic of the IT productivity research. Here investigators shed light on both organizational practices and human capital requirements, which were complementary to effective IT usage and topical primarily for USA, but also for some other countries. A number of authors empirically confirmed that joint investment in both these assets and IT impacted positively firm's productivity and capitalization. In Russia such complementary interrelations research demands first to unravel IT-related organizational practices. The first results in this field are already obtained as well.

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