Technology And Demand Drivers Of Productivity Dynamics In Developed And Emerging Market Economies

Frequently, factors other than structural developments in technology and production efficiency drive changes in labor productivity in advanced and emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs). This paper uses a new method to extract technology shocks that excludes these influences, resulting in lasting improvements in labor productivity. The same methodology in turn is used to identify a stylized example of the effects of a demand shock on productivity. Technology innovations are accompanied by higher and more rapidly increasing rates of investment in EMDEs relative to advanced economies, suggesting that positive technological developments are often capital-embodied in the former economies. Employment falls in both advanced economies and EMDEs following positive technology developments, with the effect smaller but more persistent in EMDEs. Uncorrelated technological developments across economies suggest that global synchronization of labor productivity growth is due to cyclical (demand) influences. Demand drivers of labor productivity are found to have highly persistent effects in EMDEs and some advanced economies. Unlike technology shocks, however, demand shocks influence labor productivity only through the capital deepening channel, particularly in economies with low capacity for counter-cyclical fiscal policy. Overall, non-technological factors accounted for most of the fall in labor productivity growth during 2007-08 and around one-third of the longer-term productivity decline after the global financial crisis.

The world, of late, has seen a productivity slowdown. Many countries continue to recover from various shocks in the macro business environment, along with structural changes and inward looking policies. In contemporary times of growth slumps, various exits and protectionist regimes, this book engages with the study of productivity dynamics in the emerging and industrialized economies. The essays address the crucial aspects, such as the roles of human capital, investment accounting and datasets, that help understanding of productivity performance of global economy and its several regions. This book will be of interest to academics, practitioners and professionals in the field of economic growth, productivity and development studies. This will also be an important reference on empirical industrial economics in both India and the world.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Innovation is a pivotal driving force behind economic growth. Technological capability deepens and diversifies industrial activity, which fundamentally enhances growth potential. Consequently, failure to build effective technological capability can lead to slow long-term economic growth. This book synthesizes and interprets existing knowledge on technology upgrading failures in order to better understand the challenges of technology upgrading in emerging economies. The objective is to bring together diverse evidence on three major dimensions of technology upgrading: paths of technology upgrading, structural changes in the nature of technology upgrading, and the issues of technology transfer and technology upgrading. Knowledge on these three dimensions is synthesized at the firm, sector, and macro levels across different countries and world macroregions. Compared to the challenges and uncertainties facing emerging economies, our understanding of technology upgrading is sparse, unsystematic, and scattered. The recent growth slowdown in many emerging economies, often known as the middle-income trap, has reinforced the importance of understanding the technology upgrading challenges they experience. While our understanding of these issues from the 1980s and 1990s is relatively more systematised, the more recent changes that took place during the globalization and proliferation of global value chains, and the effects of the 2008 financial crisis, have not been explored and compared synthetically. The current effects of COVID-19, geopolitical struggles, and the growing concern around environmental sustainability add significant complexity to an already problematic situation. The time is ripe to take stock of our existing knowledge on processes of technology upgrading in emerging economies and make further inroads in research on this crucial issue.

The COVID-19 pandemic struck the global economy after a decade that featured a broad-based slowdown in productivity growth. Global Productivity: Trends, Drivers, and Policies presents the first comprehensive analysis of the evolution and drivers of productivity growth, examines the effects of COVID-19 on productivity, and discusses a wide range of policies needed to rekindle productivity growth. The book also provides a far-reaching data set of multiple measures of productivity for up to 164 advanced economies and emerging market and developing economies, and it introduces a new sectoral database of productivity. The World Bank has created an extraordinary book on productivity, covering a large group of countries and using a wide variety of data sources. There is an emphasis on emerging and developing economies, whereas the prior literature has concentrated on developed economies. The book seeks to understand growth patterns and quantify the role of (among other things) the reallocation of factors, technological change, and the impact of natural disasters, including the COVID-19 pandemic. This book is must-reading for specialists in emerging economies but also provides deep insights for anyone interested in economic growth and productivity. Martin Neil Baily Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution Former Chair, U.S. President’s Council of Economic Advisers This is an important book at a critical time. As the book notes, global productivity growth had already been slowing prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and collapses with the pandemic. If we want an effective recovery, we have to understand what was driving these long-run trends. The book presents a novel global approach to examining the levels, growth rates, and drivers of productivity growth. For anyone wanting to understand or influence productivity growth, this is an essential read. Nicholas Bloom William D. Eberle Professor of Economics, Stanford University The COVID-19 pandemic hit a global economy that was already struggling with an adverse pre-existing condition—slow productivity growth. This extraordinarily valuable and timely book brings considerable new evidence that shows the broad-based, long-standing nature of the slowdown. It is comprehensive, with an exceptional focus on emerging market and developing economies. Importantly, it shows how severe disasters (of which COVID-19 is just the latest) typically harm productivity. There are no silver bullets, but the book suggests sensible strategies to improve growth prospects. John Fernald Schroders Chaired Professor of European Competitiveness and Reform and Professor of Economics, INSEAD

Total factor productivity growth was stagnant or slowing in many advanced countries even prior to the crisis. This paper documents sector-level productivity patterns across advanced economies prior to the crisis and examines the role of product and labor market rigidities as well as innovation and investments in information technology and human capital in driving productivity differences across sectors and countries. Since productivity payoffs of reforms evolve over time, we also focus on large changes in the structural indicators examine their dynamic impact on productivity, employment, and output. Our results suggest that reform priorities depend on country-specific settings, including the scale of specific policy distortions and the distance from the technology frontier. Productivity gains from reforms are large and materialize predominantly in the medium term, with some important variations across industries and countries.

This paper analyzes productivity growth trends in emerging-market economies vis-à-vis advanced economies, both in the recent global productivity slowdown and from a long-term perspective. While income has converged in most countries in the last three decades, total factor productivity has diverged. Periods of high productivity growth coincide with episodes of output accelerations, while during normal times productivity growth is modest. Most recently, the correlation between productivity growth in emerging markets and advanced economies has increased. This paper analyzes potential factors explaining this increase, which presumably is due to the slowdown in trade and microeconomic factors that underlie technology diffusion. It concludes with a discussion of long-term challenges and opportunities facing emerging-market economies in a low productivity environment.

The global productivity slowdown is affecting mature as well as emerging economies and this pattern has been particularly prominent over the past five years. Productivity levels in mature economies are almost five times higher than those of emerging countries, providing ample catch-up opportunities for emerging markets in their efforts to generate growth and eradicate poverty. This article highlights the forces of new technologies and business models as key drivers for emerging and mature economies' productivity and hence future growth patterns. However, emerging markets have to find a way to make good use of available productivity-enhancing technologies and business models that meet their economies' needs and capabilities.

Our answer: Not so well. We reached that conclusion after reviewing recent research on the role of technology as a source of economic fluctuations. The bulk of the evidence suggests a limited role for aggregate technology shocks, pointing instead to demand factors as the main force behind the strong positive comovement between output and labor input measures.

"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

"This paper empirically assesses the role of structural and institutional reforms in driving productivity growth across countries at different stages of development, using a distance-to-frontier framework. It gauges whether particular policies and reforms matter more for increasing productivity growth at the aggregate and sectoral levels for some emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) than others. Recognizing the possibility of time lags between reform implementation and reform payoffs, the paper also examines how productivity gains from various reforms evolve over the the short- and medium-term."-