Abstract
Despite higher levels of R&D investment, Japanese companies continue to have lower IT investments than other advanced countries. Some attribute this to the low productivity growth rate and "the lost decade". Therefore, this paper studied the differences between the IT investments in Japan and the USA by accessing an open database to show the reason for these phenomena. As a result, there were typical differences especially about the usage patterns of software investment between Japan-USA IT investments. This suggests that the rapid change emerged during IT-evolution age and Japan could not catch up the new trends. So, this study sets the hypotheses based on the findings and clarifies the mechanism to generate these differences through the verification processes of the hypotheses.
