Page - (000014) - in Disrupted Development and the Future of Inequality in the Age of Automation

2 L. SCHLOGL AND A. SUMNER 1.1 introduction A specter is haunting the industrialized and developing world—the specter of automation. 1.8 bn jobs or two-thirds of the current labor force of developing countries are estimated to be susceptible to auto- mation from today’s technological standpoint, according to the World Bank (2016). Employment generation is crucial to spreading the benefits of economic growth broadly and to reducing global poverty. And yet, emerging economies face a contemporary challenge to traditional path- ways to employment generation: automation, digitization, and labor- saving technologies. A broad range of international agencies have recently flagged such issues relating to the future of employment, and the consequences of automation and deindustrialization in their global reports (ADB, 2018; Hallward-Driemeier & Nayyar, 2017; ILO, 2017; IMF, 2017; UNCTAD, 2017; UNDP, 2015; UNIDO, 2016; World Bank, 2013, 2016) and the International Labor Organization (ILO) has launched a Global Commission on the Future of Work. Employment prospects have also come into sharp focus because of the contested experiences of “premature deindustrialization” (Palma, 2005; Rodrik, 2016) and weak- ening employment elasticities of growth.1 There is currently significant and rising interest in these issues in the scholarly community (see e.g. Acemoglu & Restrepo, 2017; Arntz, Gregory, & Zierahn, 2016; Grace, Salvatier, Dafoe, Zhang, & Evans, 2017; Mishel & Bivens, 2017; Mokyr, Vickers, & Ziebarth, 2015; Roine & Waldenström, 2014), in the reports of international agencies (see references above), and in the private sector too (Frey, Osborne, & Holmes, 2016; McKinsey Global Institute, 2017a, 2017b; PWC, 2017; World Economic Forum, 2017). Moreover, the topic has also captured the public interest, reflected by a mushrooming of media reports and popular science books on the issues (e.g. Avent, 2017; Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2011, 2014; Harari, 2016; Srnicek, 2017, to name but a few). Despite this increasing interest, the effects of automation in particular remain highly contestable and understudied with respect to develop- ing economies, given that most research has focused on high-income Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries such as the United States. These are, however, not only OECD country issues (see discus- sion of Ahmed, 2017). The World Bank (2016, pp. 22f.) estimates that