世界银行-资本激励是否会扭曲技术扩散？云、大数据和人工智能的证据（英）

Policy Research Working Paper10911Do Capital Incentives Distort Technology Diffusion? Evidence on Cloud, Big Data and AITimothy DeStefanoNick JohnstoneRichard Kneller Jonathan TimmisEast Asia and the Pacific RegionOffice of the Chief EconomistSeptember 2024 Public Disclosure AuthorizedPublic Disclosure AuthorizedPublic Disclosure AuthorizedPublic Disclosure AuthorizedProduced by the Research Support TeamAbstractThe Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.Policy Research Working Paper 10911The arrival of cloud computing provides firms a new way to access digital technologies as digital services. Yet, capital incentive policies present in every OECD country are still targeted towards investments in informational technology (IT) capital. If cloud services are partial substitutes for IT investments, the presence of capital incentive policies may unintentionally discourage the adoption of cloud and technologies that rely on the cloud, such as artificial intel-ligence (AI) and big data analytics. This paper exploits a tax incentive in the UK for capital investment as a quasi-natural experiment to examine the impact on firm adoption of cloud computing, big data analytics and AI. The empiri-cal results find that the policy increased investment in IT capital as would be expected; but it slowed firm adoption of cloud, big data and AI. Matched employer-employee data shows that the policy also led firms to reduce their demand for workers that perform data analytics, but not other types of workers.This paper is a product of the Office of the Chief Economist, East Asia and the Pacific Region. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://www.worldbank.org/prwp. The authors may be contacted at timothy.destefano@georgetown.edu, nick.johnstone@iea.org, richard.kneller@nottingham.ac.uk, and jtimmis@worldbank.org.Do Capital Incentives Distort Technology Diffusion?Evidence on Cloud, Big Data and AITimothy DeStefano∗ Nick Johnstone† Richard Kneller‡Jonathan Timmis§¶Keywords: Capital incentives, Firms, Cloud computing, Artificial IntelligenceJEL Codes: J21, J24, L20, O33∗Timothy DeStefano, Georgetown University: timothy.destefano@georgetown.edu†Nick Johnst