Management Practices and Firm Performance in Japanese and Korean Firms

The US economy had accelerated economic growth since the late 1990s. At first, many economists and policy makers believed that the rapid growth in the IT industry and IT investment contributed to the acceleration in US economic growth and many advanced countries supported the IT industry and IT investment in their own countries. However, the gap in rates of economic or productivity growth between the US and other advanced countries has remained even in the early 2000s. Since then, many economists have paid attention to the complementary role in intangible assets in productivity growth, that is, they started to believe that without intangible assets, the IT assets does not contribute to productivity growth at the firm and aggregated level.