Views from the Center

Caroline Atkinson and I recently posted a blog summarizing our main takeaways from a year-long study group that CGD hosted on technology, comparative advantage, and development prospects. A notable reaction I got to this piece is why there seemed to be such a wide divergence of views about this issue—notably relating to automation, robotics, and AI—across a range of experts. 

The participation of women in the Nigerian tech sector is low. In a survey of tech firms conducted by the ONE Campaign and the Center for Global Development, only about 30 percent were owned by women, mostly concentrated in e-commerce and enterprise solutions. Of women-owned firms, the median share of ownership is 20 percent. Tech firms do not employ many women either—31 firms in our sample employ no women at all. The median value is two female employees per firm.

In July 2018, we set up a CGD study group to discuss the impact on developing countries of automation, manufacturing, artificial intelligence, and the global governance of data. Let's step back and summarize some of what we've heard and read, and where we think the conversation might be headed.

Information and communication technologies have been rewiring the global economy for more than a quarter of a century. However more is known about tangible goods than about the growing intangible flows between nations. Multinationals have long allocated their financial transactions, leases, and intellectual property across economies based on a number of considerations, including to reduce their tax payments. These internal transfers are quite opaque. And two newer phenomena related to the digitalisation of economic activity are making it particularly difficult to analyse the modern global economy: contract manufacturing and cloud computing.