Factors Explaining ICT Investment Behavior of Firms During the 2008 Economic Crisis

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we develop a set of research hypotheses concerning the effects of six groups of factors on firms’ behavior during the 2008 global economic crisis with respect to ICT investment: three groups of internal factors (overall firm resource endowment, ICT-related resource endowment, ICT-related capabilities) and three groups of factors (competition, liquidity problems, macroeconomic conditions concerning demand). These research hypotheses are tested using data from Greek firms for the economic crisis period 2009–2014.

KEYWORDS:

• ICT
• ICT investment
• ICT resources
• ICT capabilities
• Cloud computing
• economic crisis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. However, it is worth-mentioning a case study by Leidner et al. (2003), based on interviews with 20 CIOs, which identified four approaches to managing ICT during the crisis of 2000–02 that differ in their time horizon (short-term or long-term) as well as in the degree of changing the preexisting ICT plan. Also, Loukis et al. (2021) analyze the ICT-related behavior of the five “system-relevant” Greek banks in the first years 2010–2014 of the Greek economic crisis.

2. Bertschek et al. (2017) find in a study based on German firm data that during the crisis in 2008 and 2009 the decrease of productivity was lower in the ICT-intensive firms than in the non-ICT intensive ones, presumably because the former were more successful in introducing ICT-based process innovations during this period than the latter.

3. Due to missing values for several variables we could use only 306 observations for the econometric part.

4. The structure of a representative sample of the Swiss economy served as reference for the final composition of our sample by sector: manufacturing: 40.2% of all firms in the sample; modern services: 30.0% of service firms (Arvanitis et al., 2014, p. 24).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sp. Arvanitis

Dr. Spyros Arvanitis is a Senior Researcher at the ETH Zurich. He has been until his retirement in 2019 Head of the Innovation Economics Research Group of the KOF Swiss Economic Institute at the ETH Zurich. Dr. Arvanitis holds doctoral degrees from the Univeresity of Zurich (economics) and the ETH Zurich (chemistry). He has published widely on the economics of innovation, technology diffusion, firm performance and market dynamics.

E. Loukis

Dr. Euripidis Loukis is Professor of Information Systems at the Department of Information and Communication Sytems Engineering, University of the Aegean, Greece. Previously he has taught at the Postgraduate Program ‘Athens MBA’ of the National Technical University of Athens and the Athens University of Economics and Businee. He has served also as Information Systems Advisor of the Ministry to the Presidency o f the Governement of Greece. Prof. Loukis has conducted extensive research in the areas of information sytems and e-government.