Page - (000093) - in Disrupted Development and the Future of Inequality in the Age of Automation

7 CONCLUSIONS 87 Social safety nets, on the other hand, do seem to offer one strategy; yet, to the extent that they raise the cost of labor, could exacerbate the trend toward technological substitution. In this context, discussions about a living-wage level universal basic income (UBI) somewhat smack of a “first-world problem”: to be able to worry about the redistribution of profits due to productivity gains assumes the luxury of jurisdiction over those profits, which many developing countries may not have. So, what to do? We see the policy space for developing countries split between cop- ing and containment strategies and constrained by globalization. Protectionist trade policy in the North could well accelerate reshor- ing, and hence the impacts on the developing world that this book dis- cusses. In the long term, utopian as it may seem now, the moral case for a global UBI-style redistribution framework financed by profits from high-productivity production clusters in high-income countries may become overwhelming, but it is difficult to see how such a framework would be politically enacted. For the moment, in any case, workers in developing countries are facing an uphill battle against a growing “Robot Reserve Army”. Avenues for future research are numerous. Here we simply set out a range of indicative questions. The core research question is, given a context of automation and digitization, how are developing countries to increase the quantity and quality of employment growth? The core question can be broken down into three clusters of (indicative) sub- questions. First, regarding the poverty–employment nexus: How/ when/why does productivity growth translate into employment growth? What determines the distribution of productivity gains in terms of the functional distribution of income between capital and labor? Second, regarding the automation–employment nexus: Which tasks are being automated and by when? How do automation and digitization impact different developing countries, considering their specific production, employment, and export structures, and differing contexts? Third, regarding political and policy implications: What have been or are likely to be the political consequences of changes in employment due to auto- mation and digitization? Under what conditions and circumstances can technological change and deindustrialization be inclusive? What factors incentivize and constrain the adoption of labor-saving technol- ogies? And how have national and subnational governments responded to date? How have existing deindustrialization, automation, and its