人工智能全球化与经济发展战略.docx

1 Introduction 2Downside Risks of Technological Progress 61.1 Resource-Saving Technological Progress 81.2 Labor-Saving Technological Progress121.3 Information, Digital Monopolies and Superstars191.4 Misguided Technological Progress201.5 Broader Harms Associated with AI21Evaluating the Downside Risks221.6 Uncertainty about the Pace and Scale of Progress221.7 The Productivity Puzzle: Are we really in an era of unprecedented innovation?241.8 Putting AI in the Broader Context of Development241.9 Technological Change and the Green Transition 25Lessons from Past Technological Transformations261.10 Pre-Industrial Revolution 271.11 Industrial Revolution 281.12 Manufacturing-Based Export-Led Growth301.13 What is Different This Time31Economic Policy Responses321.14 Taxation and Redistribution 321.15 Expenditure and Infrastructure Policy 351.16 Education351.17 New Development Strategies 36Economic Development and Global Governance391.18 A Global Tax Regime for the Digital Age401.19 Global Competition Policy 411.20 Intellectual Property Rights 421.21 Data and Information Policy43Conclusion 44Appendix: Isoquants and Factor Price Frontier for Cobb-Douglas Production Functions521 IntroductionAll around the world, there are fears of job losses and increasing inequality resulting from AI and related forms of automation technologies. Developing countries and emerging market economies have even more reason to be concerned than high-income countries, as their comparative advantage in the world economy relies on abundant labor and natural resources. Our analysis and findings in this paper apply equally to most developing countries and emerging market economies. For succinctness of exposition, we will only refer to developing countries in the remainder of the paper. Declining returns to labor and natural resources as well as the winner-takes-all dynamics brought on by new information technologies could lead to further immiseration in the developing world. This would undermine the rapid gains that have been the hallmark of success in development over the past fifty years, and threaten the progress made in reducing poverty and inequality.However, the increase in world output does not necessarily imply that all factor owners are better off. The income share of natural resources declines by dy, and the overall effect of the described technological progress on the marginal product of natural resources is1 y dY令办1 y dY令办dF&_d(l -y»/N dy , ayThe square brackets after the last equality reflect two competing effects: the first term captureswhat we may call a productivity effect - world output rises since the innovation relaxes the constraint posed by the limited availability of natural resources; the term is positive whenever the new technology is used, i.e. whenever natural resources are relatively scarce, as observed in the lemma above. The second term captures what we may call a displacement effect and is always negative - the relative share of world output earned by natural resources and thus by the developing country declines. The productivity effect will only dominate if the scarcity of natural resources is really severe, i.e. if y <otherwise the displacement effect dominates.Hicks (1932) defined technological progress as factor-saving when it reduces demand for a factor at given market prices. In our setup, this is equivalent to reducing the marginal product of a factor given the available factor supplies. We can therefore summarize our results in the following proposition:Proposition 1 (Natural Resource-Saving Innovation): (i) An innovation captured by dy > 0 is natural resource-saving if and only ifNn »- > n* =嫉，%$(11) If the condition is met, the innovation reduces the terms-of-trade F& and the total income N , F& of the resource-exporting developing country, making the country worse off in absolute terms.A tangible example would be oil-exporting countries that rely on their export revenue to buy food and other basic essentials. If they suffer large terms-of-trade losses, the consequences could be dire. Many oil-exporting countries have already experienced developmental challenges while being resource-rich. Resource-saving AI, while saving the planet, would make them resourcepoor countries that still experience the same developmental challenges. This would really test the global community. More generally, the impact on exporters of different types of natural resources may be quite different - for example, oil exporters will fare very differently from exporters of rare earth metals.Let us now consider the effects of an innovation dy > 0 on another country i with endowments of skilled labor and natural resources of JL N K. We already know that the country will be better off if its natural-resource intensity corresponds to the global average N/L since the innovation makes the world as a whole better off. However, in the more general case that factor endowments are distributed asymmetrically around the world, the benefit of the innovation to each country will depend on its relative endowment of skilled labor. By evaluating the impact on the overall income of country i, dLF'L + N'F&/dy, we find:Proposition 2 (Threshold of Natural-Resource/Skilled-Labor Intensity): A natural resourcesaving innovation dy > 0 will make country i worse off if and only if its natural-resource intensity is greater than a critical threshold ii that depends on the world economy's naturalresource intensity n = N/L,N1 -ylnnr > ii = n ' /入 、 L1 + (1 y) InnConversely, any country with lower natural-resource intensity will be better off from the innovation.In the setup above, we have outlined the effects of natural resource-saving technological progress in a simple two-factor setting. Similar results hold for production functions with additional factors, e.g. the specification Y = FK, L, N).2.2 Labor-Saving Technological ProgressMany are concerned that AI may be labor-saving, or at least unskilled-labor saving, at the global level. Labor-saving progress means that at existing factor prices, demand for labor will go down. If this occurs, equilibrium wages will go down and workers will be worse off. In the case of unskilled labor-saving progress, the same will be true for the equilibrium wages and incomes of unskilled workers.Over the past half-century, the US and many other countries have experienced technological progress that was biased against labor and reduced the labor share of national income (Karbarbounis and Neiman, 2013), although we note that the decline in the labor share of some countries (including the US) was also heavily influenced by the weakening of the bargaining power of workers, e.g. by changes in labor legislation and rules, unionization and globalization. And there are indications that progress may even have been labor-saving for some, reducing the real incomes of workers with lower levels of education, in particular workers without college degrees. For example, Autor et al (2003) observe that machines are becoming more and more efficient at performing routine functions that have traditionally been performed by unskilledlabor, and this has dragged down wages for unskilled workers. AI is likely to continue the trend (see e.g. Berg et al., 2018; Korinek and Stiglitz, 2019).Although labor-saving technological progress would make the world as a whole richer, it would hit developing countries that have a comparative advantage in cheap labor especially hard. If worldwide demand for labor, or for unskilled labor, declines, such countries would experience a significant deterioration in their terms of trade and lose a substantial fraction of their export income, to the point that it may make entire countries on net worse off. See also Alonso et al. (2020) for a quantitative evaluation and Faber (2021) for empirical evidence.Consider a model of a developing country that has an endowment of Lr units of raw labor, which it employs to produce labor-intensive intermediate goods that are exported in exchange for consumption goods. Advanced economies import the labor-intensive intermediate goods and combine them with capital K to produce consumption goods according to the Cobb-Douglas production functionY = F(K，L) = K"%/where capital K stands for a wide range of types of capital, including e.g. the human capital inherent in skilled labor. The rest of the world also has an endowment of labor L°, and for simplicity we assume that raw labor is converted into the labor-intensive intermediate goods one- for-one, giving rise to a total supply of L = L° + L'. In competitive markets, this production function results in factor shares a for all types of capital and 1 a for raw labor. Using the price of final output as the numeraire, the marginal product of labor .=(1 a) - Y/L represents the terms-of-trade of the developing country.Consider a technological innovation that increases the Cobb-Douglas coefficient on capital by da and assume that capital is sufficiently abundant, i.e. k > Q = 1, so producers find it optimal to deploy the new technology. In that case, the innovation increases total output but reduces the share of income earned by labor. In analogy to the resource-saving innovation of the previous section, we find the following results:Proposition 3 (Labor-Saving Innovation): (i) An innovation captured by da > Q is labor- saving if and only if17 <R：=e”/C'%/) L(ii) A labor-saving innovation reduces the terms-of-trade 户 and the total income Lr 户 of the developing country, making the country worse off in absolute terms.The condition in part (i) of the proposition is satisfied as long as the capital intensity of the world economy is not too high. Otherwise the productivity effect from saving on scarce labor would outweigh the displacement effect of labor in production.A tangible example would be a country that owns little capital and exports simple manufacturing goods that are produced using largely unskilled labor, e.g. textiles, in exchange for imports of food. If the population of the country is living close to subsistence levels before the innovation, then the terms-of-trade losses associated with the innovation may well push the incomes of unskilled workers below subsistence levels, resulting in widespread misery.As in the previous section, we can also find a threshold capital intensity below which a country i is worse off from the innovation.Proposition 4 (Threshold for Capital Intensity): A labor-saving innovation da > 0 will make country i worse ojfifand only if its capital intensity K'/L is less than a critical threshold,K'1 (1 cr) In /c_ < k = k ：一；L1 + a In kHowever, the results of our simple two-factor model only capture the short-run effects. The described innovation may be labor-saving, but there are two additional considerations that matter for the long run: First, in a dynamic setting, much depends on how technology will evolve in the future. If the new technology is currently more productive but improves at a lower rate in the future, the older technology will eventually predominate. If the new technology implies further progress that saves on labor, the effect on wages may be exacerbated. Second, the greater productivity of capital will induce capital owners to accumulate more of it, which may in turn raise wages. We analyze these latter effects in the following.Long-run Effects of Labor DisplacementThe long-run effects of technological change that displaces labor heavily depend on how much capital the economy accumulates, which depends on the consumption growth and time preferences of economic agents. Many of our intertemporal models assume additively separable time preferences. This assumption greatly simplifies the analysis of intertemporal problems but is by no means natural or general. Alternative representations include, for example, the recursive utility setup of Koopmans (I960) or, more recently, the non-homothetic preferences of Straub (2020).The long-run effects of technological change that displaces labor heavily depend on how much capital the economy accumulates, which depends on the consumption growth and time preferences of economic agents. Many of our intertemporal models assume additively separable time preferences. This assumption greatly simplifies the analysis of intertemporal problems but is by no means natural or general. Alternative representations include, for example, the recursive utility setup of Koopmans (I960) or, more recently, the non-homothetic preferences of Straub (2020). With time separability, the long run interest rate is determined by p + where p is the pure rate of time preference together, g is the rate of consumption growth, and rj is the (absolute value) of the elasticity of marginal utility. Assume that the rate of technological change (and hence the rate of consumption growth) is the same for the new and oldtechnologies. Then the long-run equilibrium return on capital (denoted by an asterisk) is also constant at F： = p + 6 + where 8 is the depreciation rate, and is unaffected by the innovation. In that case, an analysis of the effect on the factor price frontier is convenient, for we know that from a long-run perspective, any innovation shifts out the factor price frontier. By implication, the innovation must shift out the factor price frontier at = p + 8 + vg, increasing the income that is collectively earned by the other factors. In the analytic model above in which labor is the only factor that cannot be accumulated, this implies that labor will necessarily be better off in the long run (see also Caselli and Manning, 2019), In the case of non-homothetic/non-separable utility functions it is possible that the long run interest rate might increase with new technology, and in that case, workers could be worse off even in the long run, even in a model that encompasses only capital and labor. Similarly, even with time-separable utility functions with constant elasticity of marginal utility, it is possible that the new technology has a higher rate of technological change (making it all the more superior to the old technology), which would increase the rate of interest and the equilibrium return on capital. At the same time, however, this would also raise the rate of increase of wages.When there are multiple factors in addition to capital, then the sum of the returns on these other factors will always increase in a model with a fixed rate of time preference, but some factors may well be worse off, even in the long run. For example, in a model with skilled labor, unskilled labor and capital, skilled labor may appropriate all the gains from technological progress and capital accumulation plus some more, and unskilled labor may be worse off. Similarly, in a model with capital, labor, and a third scarce factor that cannot be accumulated, like land or natural res