How the advancement of information and communications technologies (ICT) and digitalization affect labor productivity is subject of an ongoing debate. While parts of the literature find the expected positive effects, other studies have found no effect, resulting in the so-called productiviy paradox. As most of the studies have focused on economically advanced economies such as OECD countries, evidence for less developed economies has been sparse. We use a digitalization composite index from a balanced panel of 40 Sub-Saharan African (SSA) economies, using data from 2006 to 2021, to assess the effect of digitalization on aggregate labor productivity in SSA economies. We employ generalized least squares (GLS) and system generalized methods of moments (GMM) methods to capture the effects of digitalization on labor productivity levels in agriculture, manufacturing, and service sectors. Our results show a weak association between digitalization and overall labor productivity. However, when sectors are analyzed separately, digitalization has a positive effect on labor productivity in agriculture and manufacturing sectors, whereas we find evidence for the productivity paradox in the service sector, with even a negative effect of digitalization on labor productivity.

This paper investigates the existence of oil pass through to inflation under different inflation regimes in Turkey. In order to compare the difference between the oil pass-through effects in the low and high inflation periods we employ Markov Regime Switching Vector Autoregressive (MS-VAR) model as a non-linear estimation framework. The regime-dependent impulse responses do not indicate strong pass through from crude oil prices to inflation in both regimes. However, this channel is working through refined petroleum product prices. The results show that there is a substantial decline in pass-through from refined petroleum prices to inflation as the economy moves from high to low inflation regime. These findings support the hypothesis of Taylor (2000) suggesting that low inflationary environment leads to a low pass-through.