Digital World Economy. An economic perspective on industry 4.0

Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject Economics - Innovation economics, grade: 1,3, University of Wuppertal (Jean Monnet Chair for European Economic Integration), language: English, abstract: The elementary technology the 'Internet' enabled the fourth industrial revolution. It changed the way people work. The collaboration in server-clouds and the so-called 'Internet of Things' allows even machines to interact. Many questions are still unsolved, e.g. the key technologies or their impact on the economic growth of economics. Nowadays the transformation process is ongoing while the impact of this technological change is still unclear. The McKinsey consulting group estimates that just the internet accounts for 21 percent of the GDP growth in major economies over the past five years. Furthermore, researcher mention that the share of ICT capital is often underestimated. In real terms (evaluated in prices in 1995), the share of ICT was roughly twice as high, because of the continuously falling prices for ICT technologies and services. Fifteen years prior, the landscape internet-driven companies seemed to stop the growth path after the 'Dotcom-Crash'. Before, the expectations of immense productivity gains were higher than the possibilities of the technology. Also, the average employee was not ready to handle the challenges of digitalization, robotic and the pace of technological change. In 2017 digitalization and automatization literature provides a wide range of IT-specific but also managerial-specific guidance. Available economic papers refering to industry 4.0 are comparatively few. And if available, then are more focused on the impact of ICT on economic growth. This paper tries to fill the gap to the point of a political-economic perspective on industry 4.0. The object of interest is particularly productivity changes caused through digitalization and automatization which can be summed in the main driving forces of industry 4.0. The initial point of the investigation is the theoretical framework of the Cobb-Douglas-Production-Function. It will be converted in an applied model form, which could be tested with the EU KLEMS database. To justify a claim of this kind, growth accounting estimates are used. The traditional neoclassical methodology determines a contribution to growth from an exogenous technological change in the Solow residual estimate of total factor productivity (TFP) growth.