Recent papers and articles by economists have suggested that there have been no gains in productivity due to the massive global investment in information technology. This is a subject on which Peter Cochrane, Chief Technologist for BT and Collier Professor for The Public Understanding of Science & Technology at Bristol University feels strongly. In an exclusive interview with Hard Copy he tells why:

This is just rubbish. It is down to the fact that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for all nations is simply incorrectly calculated. The measure of goods and services delivered takes no account of software or software productivity.

Everything that we use is now dominated by software. Products now are nothing like they used to be. It is simple-minded to look at Detroit now and say that it produces 3.2 million cars which is the same that it did 20 years ago, or to look at Dagenham in the same way and then say that there has been no productivity gain.

Again, this is rubbish. It completely ignores the fact that the cars are more technically advanced. They are produced for a lower cost, to a higher specification. We are all getting a Rolls Royce performance now compared to 50 years ago.

A generation ago, most people couldn't listen to music - now you can carry around a 70-piece orchestra wherever you go.

And this is true across the board. A tenth of the people are now producing the same or more products. You look at industries where turnover is flat and you find that total production is up tenfold and price is down tenfold.

You only have to look how fast global commerce is going - it has risen by a factor of ten in the last ten years. The real GDP, the world economy, is probably twice what we think it is.

All of the investment in IT has been quite remarkable. Particularly in the US you can see how powerful the PC can be in speeding up transactions, letting us do more and more in less time. It took a hundred years, from 1876 to 1976, for the telephone to start transforming the economy. So far, it has only taken the PC 20 years to achieve much more. We can now cope with more, through e-mail than we ever did with hordes of assistants and do it wherever we are. In the year 2000 the e-conomy will grow from ?320 billion to $1 trillion.

And the GDP figures, unable to cope with sales and services, will continue to give the wrong impression. I foresee that there will be a growth of the 'bit' economy - people will barter services over the Internet. This will be a 'hidden economy' and will be far greater than any black economy. By 2010 the Internet economy will eclipse the GDP of the planet.