THE IMPACT OF THE INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES ON PRODUCTIVITY: CASE OF TURKEY

The emergence and intensive utilization of information and communication technologies (ICTs), which spawned the beginning of the digitization two decades ago, drive economic prosperity and sustained long-term productivity growth. The spread of ICT generates economic growth because it incurs a reduction in interaction costs, expansion of information flows and market boundaries. In other words, countries with limited ICT infrastructure encounter several economic problems such as limited information flows, overpriced cost of interaction, reduced market opportunities and thus low incomes. Therefore, technological developments have generated considerable interest among academics and practitioners in recent years. In recent decades, information and communication technologies for instance computer terminals, e-mail and the internet and their applications have become the major drivers of innovation, growth and social change. This study aims to provide a country study of Turkey with respect to the impact of ICT on the productivity. At the end of the estimation, long-term significant statistical relationship is found between information and communication technology and productivity in accordance with the literature