Scarica appunti business english e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity! The new economy In the late 1990s, many business leaders, investors, journalists and politicians became firmly convinced about the fact that the world economy is undergoing a fundamental structural change driven by both globalization and the revolution in information and communication technology (ICT). The superior economic structure expected to arise as an outcome of these two forces was coined the ‘New Economy’ in the business press. The argument was simply that a business firm, an industry or an economy which is able to successfully utilize these global trends would eventually outperform its rivals. And, indeed, the casual evidence for the New Economy was strong. The stock market boomed, powered by ICT and ‘dotcom’ companies. New economy is a buzzword to describe new, high-growth industries that are on the cutting edge of technology and are believed to be the driving force of economic growth and productivity. A new economy was first declared in the late 1990s as hi-tech tools, particularly the Internet and increasingly powerful computers, made their way into the consumer and business marketplace. The new economy was seen as a shift from a manufacturing and commodity-based economy to one that used technology to create new products and services at a rate that the traditional manufacturing economy could not match. The idea that a new economy had arrived was part of the hysteria surrounding the tech bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The new economy was variously heralded as the knowledge economy, the data economy, the ecommerce economy, and so on. Unfortunately for the long-term health of the new economy arising in the 90s, investors and financial institutions bid up technology sector stock prices to unprecedented highs without fully considering the fundamentals. The excitement around the tech sector did more harm than good, and the rate at which these firms were pushed to become the next Microsoft likely destroyed many potentially good business ideas in the pursuit of great ones. Although the tech bubble has long since burst, many of the remaining firms like Google (Alphabet), Amazon, and Facebook remain very innovative and at the forefront of technology. Now the new economy is often used to describe different aspects of the technology sector beyond simple Internet presence and functionality. Since the tech boom of the 90s, we've seen the growth of many new and exciting subsectors in tech. These include the sharing economy, the streaming economy, the gig economy, cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence. As of 2020, the companies involved in tech, particularly Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple, have overtaken most companies in the world in terms of market cap. Although the term new economy developed as an investment buzzword around the promise of early Internet companies to change the world, the term has also been associated with calls to redesign the global economic system. The demand for a new economy in term of a total redesign of global capitalism has been put forth by people who see this as a necessary step to meet social and environmental goals. In this context, a new economy is one that focuses less on driving profits to shareholders through management and more on good corporate citizenship, positive community impacts, and distributing asset ownership differently. The benefits from the New Economy should accrue as improvements in productivity and economic growth. But while the use of information and communication technology (ICT) seems to have had a substantial impact on the performance of the United States economy, the evidence for other countries is much weaker. There are at least three possible explanations for this apparent ‘productivity paradox’. The most obvious is the fact that not many
