Sharing the benefits of innovation-digitization : a summary of market processes and policy suggestions

Governments play a very important role in supporting innovation, managing the disruptive effects of innovation, and ensuring that the benefits of innovation are broadly shared in the long run. This paper reviews the literature on market mechanisms that translate innovation into jobs and policies that are needed to improve outcomes. Although many countries now recognize the importance of modifying fiscal redistribution and insurance mechanisms to deal with the challenges of the digitization age, no country has yet done so feasibly. Developing country governments, having lower institutional capacity and usually fewer resources, will likely find it even more difficult to manage these changes. Global production patterns are likely to continue shifting. These shifts will depend on a combination of factors: the direction of technological change, trade agreements, global demand patterns, policies, and endowment shifts. Developing countries may not follow the same structural route of the past, through manufacturing, to higher income, but with appropriate investments, they can develop high-productivity service sectors. The policies that are needed to harness the benefits of digitization span a wide range of sectors: finance, competition policy, public support to innovation, fiscal and regulatory incentives for innovation, macroeconomic frameworks supporting demand growth, public support to education and reskilling, infrastructure provision for the digitization age, and sustainable fiscal insurance and redistribution systems. Finally, a lot more research needs to be done to understand how the gig economy affects the welfare of workers of different types, its macro effects, and how digitization interacts with an aging or shrinking labor force in the growth process.