Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Meeting Update October 9 2007

As mentioned in my earlier post on Monday I held a meeting with Dr.Poon were a presented to him an outline of my proposed final treatise for discussion and critical review. Overall Dr.Poon was happy with the way I proposed to segment the treatise including the points which I plan to my focus on. Dr Poon however did provide me with very useful criticism which will assist in making the overall treatise structure more sound in addition to making it flow more logically.


The first two chapters of my partial draft will be partially reworked to reflect this new strucutre. A brief summary of the contents follows.


Chapter 1


The first chapter will focus on providing a brief overview of the productivity paradox and the evolution of thechnology over the past 20 years. It will then lead into the argument put forth by Paul Romer (1995) about the evolving nature and definition of IT especially the reconceptualisation of IT into seperate components. This will then be linked to current state and statsitics of IT productivity in Australia. From these figures and statistics the exploratory nature of the treatise will be set providing the reasons for wanting to explore the nature and realtionship of IT capital with other productivity capital inputs in Australia.


Chapter 2


The literature that was used in the partial draft will be able to be re-used however the way in which the literature review is segmented has changed. The first section will deal with definifition of the productivity paradox. Each subsection will deal with different conceptualisations of the paradox that have been found in literature such as measurement error, ommitted vairables, capturing intagiable items etc. The next setion will deal with how the definition of IT has been reconceptualised e.g. such as IT as GPT, IT as ane enabler, Paul Romers argument etc. This will then be proceeded with a discussion of the results of previous work which have examined the substitutability and complementarity of IT capital with other produciton inputs. The final section will provide the current state of research on my thesis topic: "Exploring the IT complementarities among capital inputs in productivity analysis" and illustrate any short comings and which particular short coming I will be investigating.


As mentioned in my last post I was going to provide the literature I have found regarding IT as GPT and the disembodiment and emobodiment of technology. One suck important paper is the following:

  • R. Boucekkine, D. De La Croix, and O. Licandrom, "Vintage Capital."
  • R. G. Lipsey, C. Bekar, and K. Carlaw, "What Requires Explanation?," in General Purpose Technologies and Economic Growth, E. Helpman, Ed. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1998.
  • R. G. Lipsey, C. Bekar, and K. Carlaw, "The consequences of Changes in GPTs," in General Purpose Technologies and Economic Growth, E. Helpman, Ed. Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1998.


I have informed Dr.Poon that I will be providing him the first five chapters of my thesis complete or close to completion by our meeting next Monday afternoon. I plan to have the first three chapters complete and the chapters 4 and 5 close to completion as the latter two are simple reporting results and data description which do not that much time invested to produce a quality end result.

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