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Improving Last-Mile Service Delivery Using Phone-Based Monitoring
Karthik Muralidharan, Paul Niehaus, Sandip Sukhtankar, Jeffrey Weaver
AMERICAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL: APPLIED ECONOMICS,VOL. 13, NO. 2, APRIL 2021
Improving “last-mile” public service delivery is a recurring challenge in developing countries. Could the widespread adoption of mobile phones provide a scalable, cost-effective means for improvement? We use a large-scale experiment to evaluate the impact of phone-based monitoring on a program that transferred nearly a billion dollars to 5.7 million Indian farmers. In randomly selected jurisdictions, officials were informed that program implementation would be measured via calls with beneficiaries. This led to a 7.8 percent reduction in the number of farmers who did not receive their transfers. The program was highly cost-effective, costing 3.6 cents for each additional dollar delivered.
URL: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20190783
Courtesy: AEA
Are We Approaching an Economic Singularity? Information Technology and the Future of Economic Growth
William D. Nordhaus
American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 13 (1), January 2021
What are the prospects for long-run economic growth? One prominent line of economic thinking is the trend toward stagnation. Stagnationism has a long history in economics, beginning prominently with Malthus and occasionally surfacing in different guises. Prominent themes here are the following: Will economic growth slow and perhaps even reverse under the weight of resource depletion? Will overpopulation and diminishing returns lower living standards? Will unchecked CO2 emissions lead to catastrophic changes in climate and human systems? Have we depleted the store of potential great inventions? Will the aging society lead to diminished innovativeness?
URL: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170105
Courtesy: AEA
Digital manufacturing revolutions as political projects and hypes: evidences from the auto sector
Tommaso Pardi , Martin Krzywdzinski, Boy Luethje.
ILO Working paper, 27 April 2020.
Abstract : The article analyses the evolution of automotive manufacturing technologies and organisations and assesses the impact of “fourth industrial revolution” concepts and policies (in Germany, US and China) in particular for employment and work.
While it dismisses the idea that a fourth industrial revolution is under way and that a radical break will happen in the coming years, it shows that more subtle changes are taking place on the shop-floor of automotive factories that might result in deskilling and work intensification.
The article advocates for a more active role of trade unions and social partners in challenging these narratives of disruptive change and building alternative human-centred visions of the future of work.
URL: https://www.ilo.org/global/research/publications/working-papers/WCMS_742905/lang–en/index.htm
Courtesy: ILO
Smart and eco-cities in India and China
Johanna I. Höffken &Agnes Limmer.
Local Environment :The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability 24(7), 2019.
Abstract : Smart and eco-cities have become important notions for thinking about urban futures. This article contributes to these ongoing debates about smart and eco-urbanism by focussing on recent urbanisation initiatives in Asia.
Our study of India’s Smart Cities Mission launched under the administration of Narendra Modi and China’s All-In-One eco-cities project initiated by Xi Jinpin unfolds in two corresponding narratives. Roy and Ong’s [2011. Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global.
Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell] “worlding cities” serves as the theoretical backdrop of our analysis. Based on a careful review of a diverse set of academic literature, policy and other sources we identify five process-dimensions for analysing the respective urban approaches.
We show how the specific features of China’s and India’s urban focus, organisation, implementation, governance and embedding manifest both nations’ approaches to smart and eco-urbanism. We argue that India’s Smart City Mission and China’s All-in-One project are firmly anchored in broader agendas of change that are set out to transform the nation and extend into time.
The Indian Smart City Mission is part of a broader ambition to transform the nation enabling her “smart incarnation” in modernity. Smart technologies are seen as the key drivers of change. In China the framework of ecological civilisation continues a 5000-year historical tradition of civilisation excellence. By explicitly linking eco-urbanism to the framework, eco-cities become a means to enact ecological civilisation on the (urban) ground.
URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13549839.2019.1628730
Courtesy: T&F
Technological change and international relations
Daniel W Drezner.
International Relations, Volume 33 Issue 2, June 2019.
Special Issue: Reflections on International Relations 1919-2019
This article reflects on the role that technological change has played in the last century on international relations. It makes two main points. First, the relationship is reciprocal; while technological change has undeniable effects on international relations, the changing nature of world politics also affects the pace of technological change.
Second, any technological change is also an exercise in economic redistribution and societal disruption. It creates new winners and losers, alters actor preferences, and allows the strategic construction of new norms and organizations. The nature of the technology itself, and the extent to which the public sector drives the innovation, generates differential effects on international relations.
To demonstrate these arguments, special emphasis is placed on two important innovations of the last century for international relations: nuclear weapons and the Internet.
URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0047117819834629
Courtesy: Sage
Decent work in global supply chains: An internal research review
Guillaume Delautre
Research Department Working Paper n°47, 08 October 2019
This article provides an inventory of the research carried out by the ILO on decent work in GSCs between 2014 and 2019 and helps to identify the challenges and remaining gaps in terms of research.
The research undertaken by the ILO has covered a particularly broad spectrum of issues and embraced
a large array of methods and disciplinary approaches. It has made a substantial contribution to the general knowledge of GSCs on three broad areas: first, the global functioning of GSCs and their impacts
on jobs and development; next, their impacts on working conditions and labour rights; and, finally, the
governance of labour within GSCs.
In the last decades, the global economy and the world of work have been deeply impacted by the spread of global supply chains. This production model provided new opportunities for many developing countries to participate in global trade and diversify. For many others, however, the level of integration and the capacity to upgrade have remained low. Nowadays, new questions are arising on the long-term viability of GSCs as a driver of development and decent work. Disruptive forces such as technological innovations, trade arrangements and environmental and climate protection already have important consequences on the conditions for countries to develop through GSCs and the possibility for social upgrading to accompany economic upgrading. At the same time, new governance initiatives by national or international, public or private actors are also regularly emerging to promote decent work in the global economy.
Many areas and issues remain to be addressed by the ILO in the domain. Except for certain segments
of the value chains in a handful of industries, the organization is not currently able to provide a
comprehensive vision of social and employment outcomes of GSCs. For many good reasons, a large
share of the research resources has been concentrated on a limited number of labour intensive industries and countries. Moreover, our knowledge of the lowest tiers of GSCs is also often limited, as is our understanding of the involvement of certain actors, such as informal enterprises, and workers or homebased and family workers. Drawing on cutting-edge academic knowledge, the ILO must continue
monitoring public and private initiatives and assess the current reshaping of the incentive structures of
businesses towards sustainable and inclusive GSCs. In this regard, a particular focus should be placed
on the conditions for an effective social dialogue at the different levels of GSCs. To be able to address
these issues and provide a consolidated and systematic research perspective on GSCs would require the building of innovative partnerships with external actors, including other international organizations,
national statistical institutes but also private companies.
URL:https://www.ilo.org/global/research/publications/working-papers/WCMS_723274/lang–en/index.htm
Courtesy: ILO
A systemic perspective on socioeconomic transformation in the digital age
Journal of Industrial and Business Economics, , Volume 46, Issue 3
Digitalization has set the stage for a stream of radical innovations that have the potential to trigger a new technological revolution and cause deep structural changes throughout the economy, affecting not only the technology base, but also the facilitating structure (including production, infrastructure and markets), public policy, and the environment. Focusing on these building blocks, we combine network analysis and composite indicators into a novel framework to investigate a country’s socioeconomic system both across its components and over time. Its empirical application to a set of Western and Asian countries over 10 years gives insights into their socioeconomic performance and development, as well as their capability to absorb technological change. A structural decomposition analysis further allows investigating the evolution of countries’ structural transformation over time and shows the impact of digitalization and Industry 4.0 in this regard.
URL: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40812-019-00124-y
Courtesy: Springer
Fewer babies and more robots: economic growth in a new era of demographic and technological changes
SERIEs, April 2019.
This paper surveys recent research on the macroeconomic implications of demographic and technological changes. Lower fertility and increasing longevity have implications on the age population structure and, therefore, on the balance between savings and investment. Jointly with meagre productivity growth, this implies a low natural rate of interest that conditions the effectiveness of monetary and fiscal policies, especially in a world of high debt.
New technological changes (robots, artificial intelligence, automation) may increase productivity growth but at the risk of having disruptive effects on employment and wages. The survey highlights the main mechanism by which demographic and technological changes, considered both individually and in conjunction, affect per capita growth and other macroeconomic variables.
URL: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13209-019-0190-z
Courtesy: Springer
Racing With or Against the Machine? Evidence from Europe
Terry Gregory, Anna Salomons, Ulrich Zierahn
IZA DP No. 12063
A fast-growing literature shows that digital technologies are displacing labor from routine tasks, raising concerns that labor is racing against the machine. We develop a task-based framework to estimate the aggregate labor demand and employment effects of routine-replacing technological change (RRTC), along with the underlying mechanisms. We show that while RRTC has indeed had strong displacement effects in the European Union between 1999 and 2010, it has simultaneously created new jobs through increased product demand, outweighing displacement effects and resulting in net employment growth. However, we also show that this finding depends on the distribution of gains from technological progress.
URL: https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/12063/racing-with-or-against-the-machine-evidence-from-europe
Courtesy: IZA
Is Uber a substitute or complement for public transit?
Jonathan D. Hall, Craig Palsson, Joseph Price.
Journal of Urban Economics, 108. 2018.
How Uber affects public transit ridership is a relevant policy question facing cities worldwide. Theoretically, Uber’s effect on transit is ambiguous: while Uber is an alternative mode of travel, it can also increase the reach and flexibility of public transit’s fixed-route, fixed-schedule service.
We estimate the effect of Uber on public transit ridership using a difference-in-differences design that exploits variation across U.S. metropolitan areas in both the intensity of Uber penetration and the timing of Uber entry.
We find that Uber is a complement for the average transit agency, increasing ridership by five percent after two years. This average effect masks considerable heterogeneity, with Uber increasing ridership more in larger cities and for smaller transit agencies.
URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094119018300731
Courtesy: Sciencedirect
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