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Chapter 1: A Statistical Portrait of the New Economy Our goals in this chapter are
twofold. First, we want to exploit a growing pool of publicly available
data to delineate the scope and impact of the so-called “new economy.”
Our focus is on businesses, and we present a number of measures intended
to give the reader a sense of the size of the new economy, how the use
of the primary tool of the new economy, information technology, is distributed
across businesses along a number of dimensions, and what impact the new
economy has had on economic performance. Second, we want to draw attention
to the numerous gaps in the economic measurement infrastructure that make
understanding the nature and implications of the new economy more difficult.
These gaps occur along any number of dimensions, some peculiar to the
new economy and many of a more fundamental and long-standing nature. The
task of resolving these measurement gaps has been made more urgent by
the advent of the new economy. |