The current wave of technological change based on advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) has created widespread fear of job loss and further rises in inequality. This paper discusses the rationale for these fears, highlighting the specific nature of AI and comparing previous waves of automation and robotization with the current advancements made possible by a widespread adoption of AI. It argues that large opportunities in terms of increases in productivity can ensue, including for developing countries, given the vastly reduced costs of capital that some applications have demonstrated and the potential for productivity increases, especially among the low skilled. At the same time, risks in the form of further increases in inequality need to be addressed if the benefits from AI-based technological progress are to be broadly shared.For this, skills policies are necessary but not sufficient. In addition, new forms of regulating the digital economy are called for that prevent further rises in market concentration, ensure proper data protection and privacy, and help share the benefits of productivity growth through the combination of profit sharing, (digital) capital taxation, and a reduction in working time.The paper calls for a moderately optimistic outlook on the opportunities and risks from AI, provided that policymakers and social partners take the particular characteristics of these new technologies into account. which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

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In recent years, an increasing number of regional and bilateral trade agreements have emerged that include provisions on labor standards. The claimed purpose of these labor provisions is to improve working conditions in developing and emerging economies. However, little is known about whether such provisions actually do impact working conditions. This paper conducts an econometric study on the effectiveness of labor provisions in trade agreements. In particular, we evaluate the impact of the 1999 Bilateral Textile Agreement between Cambodia and the United States (CUSBTA) on both the gender wage gap and discrimination. The agreement combined the incentive of higher exports with the obligation of textile manufacturers to comply with international core labor standards, which include the elimination of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation. Using data from the Cambodia Socioeconomic Survey and applying a difference-in-difference estimation, we find a statistically significant reduction of the gender wage gap in the textile sector that can be attributed to the CUSBTA. | INTRODUCTIONEfforts to promote global trade on the multilateral level through the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) have not produced much progress over the last decade. At the same time, the number of regional and bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) has increased significantly. While the proliferation of FTAs has been well documented (see, for example, Egger and Larch, 2008;Baldwin, 2012;Kohl, Brakman, and Garretsen, 2016;ILO, 2016), less attention has been given to the fact DOI: 10.1111 that a rising number of North-South agreements contain certain legal clauses on labor standards (so-called "labor provisions"). 1The purpose of the inclusion of labor provisions is usually the claim that minimum standards on labor are needed to share the benefits of globalization with the workforce in developing countries through higher wages and better working conditions. Besides the long-standing theoretical arguments for or against labor provisions in FTAs, and whether they promote development or are hidden forms of protectionism, 2 another important question remains unanswered: there exists basically no empirical evidence on whether labor provisions actually have an effect on working conditions in developing countries when included in a trade agreement or not. There are several reasons for this lack of empirical evidence. Firstly, while the theoretical debate about the potential impact of labor provisions is quite old, the actual inclusion of labor provisions in trade agreements is a relative new phenomenon. In most of these cases, there is simply not enough data available to conduct such empirical analysis. Secondly, labor provisions in trade agreements are quite diverse and may affect a variety of working conditions in different ways, which, in turn, would make it difficult to generalize their potential impacts on working conditions. Instead, analyses need to be made for specific working conditions that can be measured. Finally, there ex...

This article puts forward an analytical and methodological framework for examining the effectiveness of labour provisions in trade agreements, illustrated by indicative case studies. Developing the notion of capacity at three levels (state, civil society and firms), the authors differentiate between proximate outcomes (legal, institutional and political) and distant, socio‐economic outcomes (improving labour rights and working conditions). They thus consider labour provisions in trade agreements as a multifaceted “policy mix” to be evaluated through qualitative and/or quantitative methods, depending on the aspect of capacity that is of interest, and on the available data. Some policy recommendations are also provided.

We analyze the relationships of three different types of patented technologies, namely artificial intelligence, software and industrial robots, with individual-level wage changes in the United States from 2011 to 2021. The aim of the study is to investigate if the availability of AI technologies is associated with increases or decreases in individual workers' wages and how this association compares to previous innovations related to software and industrial robots. Our analysis is based on available indicators extracted from the text of patents to measure the exposure of occupations to these three types of technologies. We combine data on individual wages for the United States with the new technology measures and regress individual annual wage changes on these measures controlling for a variety of other factors. Our results indicate that innovations in software and industrial robots are associated with wage decreases, possibly indicating a large displacement effect of these technologies on human labor. On the contrary, for innovations in AI, we find wage increases, which may indicate that productivity effects and effects coming from the creation of new human tasks are larger than displacement effects of AI. AI exposure is associated with positive wage changes in services, whereas exposure to robots is associated with negative wage changes in manufacturing. The relationship of the AI exposure measure with wage increases has become stronger in 2016–2021 in comparison to the 5 years before.JEL Classification: J24, J31, O33.