Volume 71, Issue 1 e12711
ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Enterprise information and communications technology software pricing and developer productivity measurement

Martin Fleming

Corresponding Author

Martin Fleming

MIT CSAIL FutureTech Lab, The Productivity Institute

Martin Fleming is Research Economist, MIT CSAIL FutureTech Lab and Fellow, The Productivity Institute; Research Economist. Martin is the former IBM Chief Economist and Chief Analytics Officer. Comments and input from Ana Aizcorbe, Jen Bruner, Dave Byrne, Carol Corrado, Diane Coyle, Marshall Reinsdorf, Shane Greenstein, Tina Highfill, Bill Nichols, Greg Prunchak, Jon Samuels, Dan Sichel, Dave Washaussen, and two anonymous referees are greatly appreciated. This work has been funded by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Any remaining errors or omissions remain the responsibility of the author.

Correspondence to: Martin Fleming, MIT CSAIL FutureTech Lab, The Productivity Institute, 264 Grandview Avenue, Glen Ellyn, IL 60137, USA ([email protected])

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First published: 25 September 2024

Abstract

The 1999 addition of business sector software and services spending to the National Income and Product Accounts was an important innovation, achieving a novel focus on the measurement of intangible asset investment. Over the intervening years, enterprise information and communication technology (ICT) has fundamentally changed. The transformation has raised questions about the extent of the decline of ICT function software prices. As a software producing sector, the business sector ICT function now has a much wider array of production factor choices. In addition, labor and multifactor software development productivity, an important sources of value creation, varies widely from year to year. With the use of a two-sector model and a standard growth accounting framework, a business sector ICT function shadow price is estimated, finding that software price declines have been underestimated by 4.4 percentage points (ppt) over 2015 to 2021. The impact on GDP growth is a 0.1 ppt underestimate. Correcting the underestimate increases software spending from 19.6% to 24.7% of nonresidential fixed investment, and from 47.4% to 59.9% of real intellectual property product spending.

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