This paper uses a unique new data set on manufacturing firms in Brazil and India to estimate production functions, augmented by information and communications technology (ICT). We find a strong positive association between ICT capital and productivity in both countries that is robust to several different specification tests. The paper also breaks new ground when using the Indian data to investigate the effect of the institutional and policy environment on ICT capital investment and productivity. We find that poorer infrastructure quality and labor market policy are associated with lower levels of ICT adoption, while poorer infrastructure is also associated with lower returns to investment.

We examine the “technology sourcing” hypothesis that foreign research labs located in the U.S. tap into U.S. R&D spillovers and improve home country productivity. We show that U.K. firms that established a high proportion of inventors based in the U.S. by 1990 benefited disproportionately from the growth of U.S. R&D stock over the next ten years. We estimate that U.S. R&D during the 1990s was associated with 5 percent higher Total Factor Productivity for U.K. manufacturing firms in 2000 (about $13 billion), with the majority of benefits accruing to firms with an innovative presence in the U.S.