The World KLEMS Initiative

The objective of this article is to provide an overview of the World KLEMS Initiative, which brings together EU KLEMS, Latin America KLEMS, and Asia-KLEMS. This project generates KLEMS data sets, consisting of inputs of capital (K) and labour (L) at the industry level, together with inputs of energy (E), materials (M) and services (S), for countries around the world. Growth of output, inputs, and productivity at the industry level is critical to understanding changes in the structure of an economy, especially the relative importance of different industries and different inputs. The article illustrates the insight into the growth process provided by the KLEMS framework by analyzing the sources of economic growth in the United States over the 1947-2010 period, including contributions to growth from ITproducing and IT-using and non-IT-using industries as well as college and non-college labour.