After two years of retrenchment, information technology-producing industries now show signs of resuming the dynamic role they played during 1996–2000.

The second half of 2000 marked a turning point in recent economic experience and gave new urgency to questions about the nature and durability of the new economy. Answers to these questions should be clearer on the far side of the slowdown. For analysts standing in the hollow of the process, however, the challenge is still to assess developments in information technology-producing and -using...

Few technologies have spread as quickly, or become so widely used, as computers and the Internet. These information technologies are rapidly becoming common fixtures of modern social and economic life, opening opportunities and new avenues for many Americans. A Nation Online: How Americans Are Expanding Their Use of the Internet shows the rapidly growing use of new information technologies across...

Robust investment in information technology (IT) played a major role in the acceleration of output and productivity growth from 1996 to 2000. Until now, however, very little was known about the extent to which small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) were taking part in the digital economy. This report examines new evidence of how small and medium-sized businesses are faring in the new economy –...

The U.S. economic expansion is now in its tenth year, showing no signs of slowing down. The rate of labor productivity growth has doubled in recent years, instead of falling as the expansion matured as in previous postwar expansions. Moreover, core inflation remains low despite record employment and the lowest jobless rates in a generation. Our sustained economic strength with low inflation...

As a result of programming decisions made during their creation, computer software and hardware may not recognize the Year 2000 accurately, causing operational errors. This report assesses the economic implications of this Y2K problem for the U.S. economy. The Department of Commerce’s Economics and Statistics Administration reviewed how firms and governments should be expected to react in the face...

Electronic commerce (business transactions on the Web) and the information technology (IT) industries that make “e-commerce” possible are growing and changing at breathtaking speed, fundamentally altering the way Americans produce, consume, communicate and play.

This report, from the 1997 Economic Census, is one of a series of four Core Business Statistics Series of reports, each of which provides statistics for individual industries and/or states. The first report, the Advance report, presents advance data at the two- and three-digit North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) levels and at the division and two-digit Standard Industrial...