The world’s stock of data continues to grow exponentially. Driven by a wide range of new technologies and new business models, from AI, business analytics and machine learning, to new service revenue models and cloud data migration, estimates for data growth rates vary from an average of 20-30% per year, to almost 60% a year. The most recent estimate by Seagate and IDC, is the global datasphere will grow from 33 zettabytes in 2018, to a staggering 175 zettabytes by 2025.  The exponential growth of data has ushered in a number of paradoxes. 

Data growth is driving increasing investment in information technology (IT) spend and ICT asset stock accumulation,  yet aggregate economic productivity, globally and by country, fell in the early 2000s, and has remained low ever since.  Business dynamism, an economic index measuring the entry and exit rates of new firms, a measure shedding light on the sources of innovation and net job creation in the economy, has been declining since the 1980s, strikingly so since the 2000s.  

These aggregate shifts manifest themselves in a pattern of empirical regularities: adding to the declining entry rate of new businesses, the job reallocation rate, and the net labor share in business dynamism have also been decreasing. Yet the profit share, market concentration, and markups across the technology sector have all been increasing.  

Why?

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