Poised to welcome 10 new member states into the fold, the European Union (EU) is striving to transform itself into a broadly based "knowledge economy" in which information and communication technology (ICT) proliferates. In March 2000, the European Commission (EC) laid out an ambitious plan -- known as the Lisbon agenda -- to create the conditions for a more vibrant and competitive economy in the EU, relying upon ICT as the mechanism for getting there.

Confoundingly, the largest, most developed economies in Europe still aren't seeing productivity gains on par with the United States from their ICT investments. Although the Nordic countries -- Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark -- boast some of the highest rates of ICT adoption and use, and are seeing real productivity boosts from it, Germany, France and Italy are lagging.

These observations, which have been much reported and mulled over in the business press and by the EU itself, have spawned differing opinions about the most important triggers of ICT-led productivity. For policymakers and business leaders, the difficulty is this: on a macroeconomic scale, productivity gains from technology investment don't seem to be predictable or automatic. Economists recognize a time lag between a country's deployment of telecommunications and computing infrastructure and the onset of its productive use, but it is not well understood why some European countries have begun reaping the economic benefits while others have not.