It makes sense: Societies that utilize new tools quickly are likely to be more productive. To help understand this relationship, Diego Comin and Bart Hobijn have spent years creating the Cross-country Historical Adoption of Technology (CHAT) data set, which examines when 161 countries adopted 104 technologies, from steam power to PCs, over the past two centuries.

A version of this article appeared in the March 2012 issue of Harvard Business Review.