The Economic Payoff from the Internet Revolution

This volume contains detailed analyses of how the Internet revolution could bring economic benefits—primarily improved productivity and higher quality—in the eight sectors of the U.S. economy that collectively account for over 70 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP): automobile manufacturing and sales, non-auto manufacturing, higher education and private-sector training, financial services, government, health care, retailing, and trucking.

Robert E. Litan is a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution and vice president for research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation. Among his many books is Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity (Yale University Press, 2007), written with William J. Baumol and Carl J. Schramm. Alice M. Rivlin is a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution and visiting professor at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. She has been director of both the White House Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office, and has served as vice chair of the Federal Reserve Board. Among her previous books is Beyond the Dot.coms: The Economic Promise of the Internet (Brookings, 2001), written with Robert Litan.