Effects of Information Technology on Production Chain in Iran: An Input-Output Approach

As a general-purpose technology, information and communication technology (ICT) leads to increasing productivity and economic growth in different sectors. Iran, as a semi-industrialized developing economy, has recently made relatively high level of investment on ICT in different sectors of the economy. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between ICT sector and other sectors of the economy using an input-output table. We construct an input-output table with 37 sectors including ICT sector, using the updated IO table for year 2010. ICT goods production comprises 1.8 percent of total goods production and ICT service is 1.32 percent of the total service production. The results show that one unit increase in final demand for information technology (IT) products will increase total output by 1.63 units and one unit increase in final demand for communication technology (CT) products will increase total output by 2.18 units. The greatest impact of ICT in manufacturing sectors will be respectively in food and beverage, basic metal, and chemical products, and in the services sector in the wholesale, retail sale, financial intermediates, and real estate services. We also calculate the Average Propagation Length (APL) of the changes in the ICT final demand. The results indicate that the average propagation length of the changes in the ICT final demand is 1 for the services sector and 2 for the manufacturing industries.
JEL Classification: O14, O3, O53.