Impact of Ict on Banking and Finance
IMPACT OF ICT IN BANKING AND FINANCE
As in a pendulum movement, the reflections about the impact of ICTs in the Economy have swung from enthusiasm to realism and back to optimism, being each of these states really subjective and implying a wide range of shades within.
After a first period of cyberoptimism, people that “wanted to see” and people that thought “waiting to see” was a bad strategy because “it will then be too late”, followed a timespan where scientists — mainly economists — stuck to strict evidence from reality, being their main conclusion that the more you spend/invest in ICTs the more they affect both the share and the growth of the GDP — an obvious conclusion to many, I’d dare say, as it’ll happen with sweets if you spent half your national budget in candy.
In the last years, due to more data available and more and better analyses, we have been seeing new findings that, at last, seem to bring more light to the issue of the impact of ICTs on the Economy. In the following table I present a summary of a good bunch of such positive impacts. One caveat is due: as it is clarified in most of the documents listed below, evidence is not always subject to generalization. While sometimes it actually is, some findings apply only to specific contexts such as countries, economies, moments of time, constellations of conditions and so forth. I nevertheless believe that these impacts are worth listing because some were predicted — or expected — ten years or more before they could be measured. On the other hand, some caveats about the applicability of these findings are mainly based on (non) availability of data. Last, but not least, because even if some results only apply, as we have said, to specific economic setups, some of these setups could be reproduced in other contexts — e.g. in developing countries — in order to try to provide the same results.
|Economic Benefits of ICTs
As in a pendulum movement, the reflections about the impact of ICTs in the Economy have swung from enthusiasm to realism and back to optimism, being each of these states really subjective and implying a wide range of shades within.
After a first period of cyberoptimism, people that “wanted to see” and people that thought “waiting to see” was a bad strategy because “it will then be too late”, followed a timespan where scientists — mainly economists — stuck to strict evidence from reality, being their main conclusion that the more you spend/invest in ICTs the more they affect both the share and the growth of the GDP — an obvious conclusion to many, I’d dare say, as it’ll happen with sweets if you spent half your national budget in candy.
In the last years, due to more data available and more and better analyses, we have been seeing new findings that, at last, seem to bring more light to the issue of the impact of ICTs on the Economy. In the following table I present a summary of a good bunch of such positive impacts. One caveat is due: as it is clarified in most of the documents listed below, evidence is not always subject to generalization. While sometimes it actually is, some findings apply only to specific contexts such as countries, economies, moments of time, constellations of conditions and so forth. I nevertheless believe that these impacts are worth listing because some were predicted — or expected — ten years or more before they could be measured. On the other hand, some caveats about the applicability of these findings are mainly based on (non) availability of data. Last, but not least, because even if some results only apply, as we have said, to specific economic setups, some of these setups could be reproduced in other contexts — e.g. in developing countries — in order to try to provide the same results.
|Economic Benefits of ICTs
References: Analysys. (2000). The Network Revolution and the Developing World. Washington, DC: infoDev. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 122(4), 1721-1758. Cambridge: MIT Press. Castells, M. (2000). “Materials for an exploratory theory of the network society”. In British Journal of Sociology, Jan-Mar 2000, 51(1), 5-24 Greenwood, J. (1999). “The Third Industrial Revolution: Technology, Productivity, and Income Inequality”. In Economic Review, (Q II), 2-12 Navas-Sabater, J., Dymond, A. & Juntunen, N. (2002). Telecommunications and information services for the poor. Toward a Strategy for Universal Access. Washington DC: The World Bank. Nishimoto, S. & Lal, R. (2005). “Development divides and digital bridges: why ICT is key for achieving the MDGs”. In Commonwealth Secretariat (Ed.), The Commonwealth Finance Ministers Reference Report 2005, 40-43 OECD. (2008). Measuring the Impacts of ICT Using Official Statistics. Paris: OECD. Retrieved January 10, 2008 from http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/43/25/39869939.pdf Primo Braga, C Souter, D. (2004). ICTs and Economic Growth in Developing Countries. Paris: OECD. Retrieved June 19, 2006 from http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/15/54/34663175.pdf Talero, E UNCTAD. (2006). Using ICTs to Achieve Growth and Development. Background paper by the UNCTAD secretariat. Geneva: UNCTAD. Retrieved February 28, 2007 from http://www.unctad.org/en/docs/c3em29d2_en.pdf