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Digital economy surges
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June 22, 1999: 4:35 p.m. ET
Info technology, e-commerce becoming top generator of jobs, revenues, trade
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WASHINGTON (CNN) - Information technology is responsible for more than a third (35 percent) of the nation's real economic growth. And by the year 2006 almost half the U.S. work force will be employed by industries that are either major producers or users of information (IT) products and services.
Those are some of the findings from a Commerce Department study released Tuesday.
The report, titled "The Emerging Digital Economy," is the second in a series of Commerce Department studies on one of the fastest growing sectors of the U.S. economy.
Among the report's other findings:
- Workers in IT industries earned an average of 78 percent more than workers generally, in 1997. In terms of real dollars, an average IT workers' salary is $59,920 vs. $29,787 for non-technology workers.
- Also, the wage gap is growing. That 78 percent gap in 1997 wages stood at 56 percent in 1989.
- Falling prices in IT industries brought down overall inflation by 0.7 percent in 1996-97 (the last year for which figures are available), which, the report said, goes a long way toward explaining how both inflation and interest rates have remained low in a period of historically low unemployment.
- IT producing industries are accounting for an increasing share of U.S. trade with other countries, capturing 19 percent of the $1.5 trillion commodities trade.
The report covers some of the same ground as a newly released study conducted jointly by the University of Texas at Austin and Cisco Systems, one of the largest companies in the Internet infrastructure field.
That report claimed the Internet economy, which includes both the infrastructure of the Internet and the commerce conducted on it, generated more than $300 billion dollars in revenue last year and was responsible for the creation of 1.2 million jobs.
Internet commerce alone totals more than $101 billion, according to the UT-Austin/Cisco report, much larger than previously estimated.
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Department of Commerce
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