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A Fortune magazine journalist draws on his expertise and extensive contacts among the companies and scientists at the forefront of artificial intelligence to offer dramatic predictions of AI’s impact over the next decade, from reshaping our economy and the way we work, learn, and create to unknitting our social fabric, jeopardizing our democracy, and fundamentally altering the way we think. Within the next five years, Jeremy Kahn predicts, AI will disrupt almost every industry and enterprise, with vastly increased efficiency and productivity. It will restructure the workforce, making AI copilots a must for every knowledge worker. It will revamp education, meaning children around the world ...
This paper quantifies the macroeconomic spillover effects of conflict within sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries using a new Conflict Spillover Index (CSI), which accounts for conflict intensity and distance from conflict-affected countries. Our findings reveal an escalation in conflict spillovers across SSA since 2011, marked by considerable cross-country heterogeneity. Impulse responses show that conflict spillovers shocks significantly and persistently hinder economic growth, while concurrently elevating inflation in the “home” country. Conflict spillover shocks are also associated with increases in (current) government spending and government debt. Furthermore, the international trad...
The need for Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries to diversify their economies is more urgent than ever. However, despite its established economic benefits, several challenges have precluded diversification in SSA. Against this backdrop, interesting initiatives to further adopt digital technologies, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, suggest that digitalization is a promising avenue to overcome barriers to diversification. Fast-paced advances in the diffusion of digital technologies and knowledge have the potential to transform SSA economies through several channels. By connecting people and facilitating the rapid diffusion of information, digitalization also promises to reshape the i...
Why the United States lags behind other industrialized countries in sharing the benefits of innovation with workers and how we can remedy the problem. The United States has too many low-quality, low-wage jobs. Every country has its share, but those in the United States are especially poorly paid and often without benefits. Meanwhile, overall productivity increases steadily and new technology has transformed large parts of the economy, enhancing the skills and paychecks of higher paid knowledge workers. What’s wrong with this picture? Why have so many workers benefited so little from decades of growth? The Work of the Future shows that technology is neither the problem nor the solution. We ...
Russia’s war in Ukraine continues to have a devastating economic and social impact. Skillful policymaking supported by external financing has helped maintain macroeconomic and financial stability despite challenging circumstances, and the authorities continue to advance important structural reforms. Better-than-expected growth outturns in 2023 and in 2024Q1 demonstrate the resilience of the economy. Approval by the United States of the US$61 billion financial and military support package, and by the European Council of the €50 billion Ukraine Facility and its underlying Ukraine Plan are positive developments following a challenging period of liquidity strains in early 2024. However, headwinds include the rising risks of a prolonged war and the economic impact of the attacks on energy infrastructure and mobilization.
Daniel Susskind traces the rich, surprisingly brief history of economic growth and responds to its ills. We cannot focus only on growth's upsides, but nor is degrowth a viable policy: the benefits of prosperity are too great to discard. Instead we must face tradeoffs, demoting growth from our top priority and reckoning with its moral challenges.
From one of the leading policy experts of our time, an urgent rethinking of how we can better support each other to thrive Whether we realize it or not, all of us participate in the social contract every day through mutual obligations among our family, community, place of work, and fellow citizens. Caring for others, paying taxes, and benefiting from public services define the social contract that supports and binds us together as a society. Today, however, our social contract has been broken by changing gender roles, technology, new models of work, aging, and the perils of climate change. Minouche Shafik takes us through stages of life we all experience—raising children, getting educated,...
This paper investigates the impact of automation on the U.S. labor market from 2000 to 2007, specifically examining whether more generous social protection programs can mitigate negative effects. Following Acemoglu and Restrepo (2020), the study finds that areas with higher robot adoption reduced employment and wages, in particular for workers without collegue degree. Notably, the paper exploits differences in social protection generosity across states and finds that areas with more generous unemployment insurance (UI) alleviated the negative effects on wages, especially for less-skilled workers. The results suggest that UI allowed displaced workers to find better matches The findings emphasize the importance of robust social protection policies in addressing the challenges posed by automation, contributing valuable insights for policymakers.
The Gambia: Selected Issues