Österreichische Entwicklungspolitik 2020. Digitalization for Development? Challenges for Developing Countries

This edition deals with the topic of 'digitalization and development'. In recent years, the discourse on a Digital Revolution of the economy has gained renewed interest, both in the academic sphere and among policymakers and the general public. This interest has been sparked by the emergence of new technologies relating to automation, robotization, artificial intelligence, big data, and Industry 4.0. The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 has proven that rapid and increasingly wide-reaching digitalization processes are irreversible. In public discourse, extreme views are widespread on both sides of the digitalization debate. On the one hand, there is the claim that digital technologies present a solution to many of our most pressing economic and social problems. On the other hand, there are rampant concerns over dystopian scenarios in which human labor is made all but redundant by digital technologies, leading to soaring unemployment rates and the collapse of our current social and economic order. Up until today, most public discourse, as well as new literature on the impact of digitalization, has mainly focused on the industrialized countries of the Global North. However, there is reason to believe that the effects of digitalization differ significantly according to the level of industrialization and income per capita and that those in the Global South likely face a range of specific challenges.