Page - (000081) - in Disrupted Development and the Future of Inequality in the Age of Automation
Image of the Page - (000081) -
Text of the Page - (000081) -
74 L. SCHLOGL AND A. SUMNER
9. Lewis believed in contrast to Asia that Africa had a labor shortage due to
agricultural land availability. The constraint to growth in Africa was low
agriculture productivity rather than manufacturing growth and required
government intervention in agriculture (See Kanbur, 2016, p. 7).
10. A second MGI report (MGI, 2017b) released later the same year was
much less pessimistic. It estimated labor displacement at 400 m jobs glob-
ally which would be offset by 555 million jobs created by increased labor
demand.
11. There are further data sets of IMF (2017) and UNCTAD (2017) which
we do not have access to at time of writing.
12. We may overemphasize the technical feasibility angle in this section given
the data we use which leads us to an inverse relationship between autom-
atability and per capita income. At the current cost of automation, there is
a positive relationship and the curve may turn into an inverted U as costs
keeps falling and all jobs in developed countries have been automated,
before eventually becoming negative; the question of course is how long
away “eventually” is. Thus our assessment may be too pessimistic.
13. There is a significant (p < 0.05) positive correlation of industrial employ-
ment shares and automatability in HICs. This pattern is also found using
the data of Arntz et al. (2016). It can similarly be observed in develop-
ing countries (non-HICs) in the McKinsey Global Institute (2017b) data
where it is though not significant as data coverage is too limited.
references
Acemoglu, D., & Autor, D. (2011). Skills, tasks and technologies: Implications
for employment and earnings. In O. Ashenfelter & D. Card (Eds.), Handbook
of labor economics (Vol. 4B, pp. 1043–1171). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Acemoglu, D., & Restrepo, P. (2015). The race between machine and man:
Implications of technology for growth, factor shares and employment. SSRN
Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2781320.
Acemoglu, D., & Restrepo, P. (2017). Robots and jobs: Evidence from US labor
markets (NBER Working Paper Series No. 23285). Cambridge, MA: NBER.
Retrieved from http://www.nber.org/papers/w23285.
ADB (Asian Development Bank). (2018). Asian development outlook 2018: How
technology affects jobs. Manila: ADB.
Arntz, M., Gregory, T., & Zierahn, U. (2016). The risk of automation for jobs
in OECD countries: A comparative analysis. OECD Social, Employment and
Migration Working Papers, 2(189), 47–54.
Atkinson, A. B., & Bourguignon, F. (2014). Introduction: Income distribution
today. In A. B. Atkinson & F. Bourguignon (Eds.), Handbook of income distri-
bution, volume 2A (pp. xvii–lxiv). Oxford and Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Disrupted Development and the Future of Inequality in the Age of Automation