The digital commercial revolution: U.S. business sales and the entrepreneurial exploitation of information and communications technology

Abstract

Businesses have taken the opportunities, made possible by information and communications technology (ICT), to develop and use digital platform services and other digital tools to support sales. This paper estimates a model of U.S. business sales and uses the estimated model to assess the economic impact of the digital commercial revolution of the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The estimations show that the entrepreneurial initiatives—that drove the digital revolution in commerce by capitalizing on the new technologies made available by the ICT revolution—came to fruition in the wake of the Great Recession. For 2019, the last year before the COVID-19 pandemic, the digital commercial revolution’s contribution to value added in the U.S. manufacturing, wholesale trade, and retail trade sectors alone has an estimated expected value that is 4.0–5.9% of GDP.