Implications of AI innovation on economic growth: a panel data study

Abstract The application of artificial intelligence (AI) across firms and industries warrants a line of research focused on determining its overall effect on economic variables. As a general-purpose technology (GPT), for example, AI helps in the production, marketing, and customer acquisition of firms, increasing their productivity and consumer reach. Aside from these, other effects of AI include enhanced quality of services, improved work accuracy and efficiency, and increased customer satisfaction. Hence, this study aims to gauge the impact of AI on the economy, specifically on long-run economic growth. This study conjectures a positive relationship between AI and economic growth. To test this hypothesis, this study makes use of a panel dataset of countries from 1970 to 2019, and the number of AI patents as a measure of AI. A text search query is performed to distinguish AI patents from other types of innovations in a public database. Employing fixed effects and generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation, this paper finds a positive relationship between AI and economic growth, which is higher than the effect of the total population of patents on growth. Furthermore, other results indicate that AI’s influence on growth is more robust among advanced economies, and more evident towards the latter periods of the dataset.