Documento de Trabajo 2009-04 Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales Universidad de Zaragoza SOURCES OF PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH AND CONVERGENCE IN ICT INDUSTRIES: AN INTERTEMPORAL NON-PARAMETRIC FRONTIER APPROACH ∗ Carmen López-Pueyo and Mª Jesús Mancebón Torrubia Universidad de Zaragoza Abstract The present work decomposes labour productivity growth in ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) sector in a set of given countries with the aim of identifying the relevance of localized innovation, capital intensification and catching up. The appropriate technology theory proposed by Basu & Weil (1998) extended with non- immediate spillovers (Los & Timmer, 2005) is the theoretical framework used. Decomposition of productivity growth is carried out from a non-parametric frontier approach following Maudos et al. (2000a) and Kumar & Russell (2002). The present work is also supplemented with kernel convergence analysis, which allows comparing growth paces in countries under study. Keywords: ICT, productivity, Malmquist index, sequential frontier, appropriate technology, localized innovation, capital intensification, catching up, spillovers, hedonic prices, convergence, kernel. JEL: O14; O33; O47; O57; D24 Corresponding author: Carmen López-Pueyo Departamento de Estructura e Historia Económica y Economía Pública Facultad de CC. Económicas y EE. Gran Vía 2 50005 Zaragoza Tfn.: 976761841 Fax: 976761840 e-mail: clopez@unizar.es ∗ The authors of this paper are grateful for the useful comments contributed by Gregorio Giménez. Financial supports provided by the Aragon Regional Government (Research Project no. 269-122) and the University of Zaragoza (Research Project no. 269-114) are also gratefully acknowledged