
The weak performance of business investment across the OECD since the Global Financial Crisis holds back potential growth. However, it masks a strong investment dynamic in digital assets such as hardware, software, and databases. This column describes how this divergence between digital and non-digital assets has intensified from the mid-2010s. The strong investment performance of the US relative to the rest of the OECD is almost exclusively a digital phenomenon. A ‘digital divide’ is emerging, where laggard countries are accumulating digital capital per worker more slowly than those with higher initial starting levels.