Least developed countries can become authors of their technological revolution
By Ratnakar Adhikari, Executive Director of the Enhanced Integrated Framework Executive Secretariat, World Trade Organization and Fabrice Lehmann, Associate, Enhanced Integrated Framework (EIF)
The fourth industrial revolution is charting a new and uncertain course for the world economy. Least developed countries must prepare for the opportunities and risks that it brings. It is characterised by the confluence of new technologies, fusing the digital, physical and biological spheres.
Rapid technological change is expected to have a profound impact on economic and social development in countries at all levels of income. Opportunities include harnessing the possibilities of digitalisation for sustainable development and social empowerment. Risks involve marginalisation and a widening chasm between poor nations and their emerging and industrialised partners.
Can countries in the early stages of development reap the benefits and become authors of their technological revolution? Continue reading “Least developed countries can become authors of their technological revolution”
Billions of people at the world’s economic ‘’margins’’ are experiencing a moment of changing connectivity. In Manila, Manchester, Mogadishu, the banlieues of Marseille and everywhere in between, the world is becoming digital, digitised and digitally mediated at an astonishing pace. Most of the world’s wealthy have long been digitally connected, but the world’s poor and economically marginal have not been enrolled in digital networks until relatively recently. In only five years (2012–2017), over one billion people became new Internet users (ITU 2016). In 2017, Internet users became a majority of the world’s population. The networking of humanity is thus no longer confined to a few economically prosperous parts of the world. For the first time in history, we are creating a truly global and accessible communication network.
Not all factories are the same. Today, their differences are bigger, more impressive and carry far-reaching implications for development in developing economies. Since the 1970s, industrial production has been organised in complex, multi-country networks of suppliers and providers. The conventional expectation was that this trend would be conducive to growing homogeneity, with converging techniques of production, salaries, standards and business organisation in the “world factory” system. However, as things do not often go “by the book”, manufacturing today encompasses far different realities. China has become the world’s leading manufacturing country. Early industrialisers have built complex value chains, delocalising non-core manufacturing activities to developing economies with relatively lower labour costs and growing domestic markets. The result: manufacturing is a collection of deeply different systems. And differences exist even within the same sector. Just look at the textiles industrial parks in Ethiopia that manufacture for and export fast fashion brands, such as Spain’s Zara. Or look at the robot-powered, fully automated smart factory of Adidas in Germany, which has been making customised mass production of textiles a reality in Europe since 2016. Consider the artisanal, luxury, on-demand, tailor-made production of Lamborghinis in Emilia Romagna, the highly automated export-oriented Audi production in Mexico, and the vertically integrated, only partially automated, domestic market-oriented BYD electric vehicle factory in Shenzhen, China. 
If we wish to create a future built on shared prosperity, digital technology will be critical.