technology adoption by firms, but most of these measures apply to very specific sectors, and therefore face constraints for purposes of comparability. Many attempts have been made to understand the dynamics of technology through innovation surveys and patent data, but they do not capture some essential features of technology adoption, particularly for developing countries.7 The relevance and emergence of digital technologies have motivated researchers to measure the use of advanced technologies by firms in numerous sectors. As a result, statistical offices from advanced economies have developed ICT surveys for that purpose, including the US Census Bureau (Information Communication Technology Survey [ICTS] and Annual Business Survey [ABS]); the European Union’s Eurostat (Community Survey of ICT Usage); and Statistics Canada (Survey of Advanced Technology [SAT]). Recently, the Canadian SAT has extended the scope of these measurement efforts to measure whether firms use a significant number of advanced technologies (between 41 and 50, depending on the round), with a focus on manufacturing. Despite significant progress, existing measures of technology still fall short of providing a comprehensive characterization of technologies used by firms. First, the number of technologies covered is rather limited when compared to how many technologies are involved in production and management processes. Second, their focus on the presence of advanced technologies makes it impossible to understand how production takes place in companies without such technologies. This concern is most relevant in developing countries where advanced technologies have diffused more slowly. Third, because their unit of analysis is the firm, existing surveys are not designed to examine technology at the level of business functions undertaken by the firm, and cannot measure which business functions benefit from each particular technology. This drawback is particularly problematic for GPTs that can be relevant for multiple business functions. Finally, existing surveys largely omit questions about how intensively a technology is employed in the firm. Therefore, they do not reveal whether a technology that is present is widely utilized or used only marginally.8 To overcome these limitations, this volume proposes a new approach to measure technology that shifts the unit of analysis from the firm to the business function level. This approach, described by Cirera et al. (2020), led to the development of a new survey instrument by the World Bank Group in collaboration with several sector and technology experts. The survey, described in the next section, has been designed to collect detailed information for a representative sample of firms about the technologies that each firm uses to perform key business functions necessary to operate in its respective sector of economic activity.
Opening the Black Box: The Firm-level Adoption of Technology (FAT) Survey The World Bank Group’s new approach to measuring technology at the firm level, the FAT survey, has been piloted to a representative sample of firms in 11 countries. Much of the 24
Bridging the Technological Divide
