EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

As a result of programming decisions made during their creation, computer software and hardware may not recognize the Year 2000 accurately, causing operational errors. This report assesses the economic implications of this Y2K problem for the U.S. economy. The Department of Commerce’s Economics and Statistics Administration reviewed how firms and governments should be expected to react in the face of the knownY2K problems and compared these results with available progress reports on Y2K readiness and other published Y2K economic assessments. 

Electronic commerce (business transactions on the Web) and the information technology (IT) industries that make “e-commerce” possible are growing and changing at breathtaking speed, fundamentally altering the way Americans produce, consume, communicate, and play.

• Growth in the available measures of e-commerce (e.g., estimates of the value of e-commerce business transactions) is outpacing last year’s most optimistic projections. As a share of the retail portion of the economy, however, e-commerce remains quite small — less than 1 percent.

This report, from the 1997 Economic Census, is one of a series of four Core Business Statistics Series of reports, each of which provides statistics for individual industries and/or states.

The first report, the Advance report, presents advance data at the two- and three-digit North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) levels and at the division and two-digit Standard Industrial Classification System (SIC) levels for 1997. This report includes statistics on the number of establishments; employment; payroll; and value of sales, receipts, revenue, or shipments. The data in this report are preliminary and are subject to change; they will be superseded by data released in later reports.