Mr. Clinton's idea that jump-starting high-tech investments will reverse the productivity slowdown is unproven.

So why don't we have more high-tech investment?

It explains, more than anything else, why enormous high-tech investments throughout the economy have produced little or no measurable improvement in productivity.

But it still accounts for some 10 percent of the country's gross national product and, more important, has been among its most successful regions in moving into modern industry by attracting high-tech foreign investment.

Incentives for high-tech investment.

The timber industry shrank, and $13 billion in high-tech investment in the Willamette Valley, from Portland south, brought record prosperity.

The firm's high-tech investments through the 1990s centered on information and communications technology, and, after 1991, increasingly focused on enterprise software.

Instead, party leaders profess, only high-tech investments would be permitted.

Besides housing, they include new plants and equipment for small and medium-sized manufacturers, resource-recovery plants that can no longer be financed on a tax-exempt basis, and high-tech investments.

"With high-tech investments in vogue," he said, "a lot of great, solid companies are being passed over."