4 For example, Japanese expenditure in R&D in 2004 was, in percent of GDP, twice as big as in the EU; in 2003, the share of population with tertiary education was 38 percent in the U.S., compared to 23 percent in the EU and 30 percent in the Scandinavian countries; venture capital investments, again as percentage of GDP, were in the U.S. in 2002 more than three times larger than in Europe in 2005; finally, both the U.S. and Japan show a vastly superior performance in terms of number of patents granted compared to the EU.
Nevertheless, differences in the ICT-producing sectors appear to be insufficient to explain the bulk of the cross-Atlantic gap in aggregate productivity growth. There is a view, which I will turn to next, that ICT-using sectors have also played a fundamental role in determining productivity improvements in the US.