Digitisation and “Dutch disease”

The digitisation of the economy is sometimes expected to lead to faster productivity gains and therefore to an increase in long-term growth. But we must take into account a mechanism that works in the opposite direction: the "Dutch disease" generated by digitisation. Dutch disease is the following mechanism: a country benefits from additional income; this additional income is spent mainly on services; this results in a rise in the relative price of services and the attraction of production factors (capital and employment) towards services, and therefore ultimately a fall in the economy's level of sophistication. Digitisation (automation) can lead to the same mechanism. It makes the companies that implement it more efficient, and the additional income that then appears in these companies eventually leads to the development of unsophisticated services, and hence, in total , to a fall in the economy's level of sophistication despite digitisation .