Guyana et Namibie, deux pays du bassin atlantique sur la nouvelle carte de l'industrie pétrolière internationale

The term “K-shaped recovery” was introduced to describe the economic recovery from the recession triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic. It refers to the uneven and divergent growth pattern between leading industries or sectors (the upper arm of the letter K—mainly the high-technology sector) and laggards, or the rest of the economy (the lower arm—the traditional industries). Since then the term has become popular in portraying divergent growth patterns within and between countries, especially as the high-tech sector has become even more important in driving GDP growth. Recent developments suggest that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have reinforced the K-shaped growth pattern in many different countries. This has been facilitated by the very fast pace of diffusion, especially of generative AI, which reached 100 million users in a few months compared to the years or even decades that it took for other general-purpose technologies to do the same. For example, it took six years for the internet and 16 years for the cellphone to achieve similar levels of usage. These developments are likely to exacerbate the growing inequalities within countries and the gaps—especially digital and AI gaps—between core foundation leaders (the US and China), several high-adoption leaders among other developed countries, and the rest of the world. Growing inequality also heightens social and political tension, adding another layer of discord in the ongoing polarization and geopolitical contention. From a strictly economic perspective, as the high-tech sector has created immense wealth for capital owners but not enough jobs or decent incomes for many working people, this has led to low real wage growth, which could weaken aggregate consumer demand, slowing economic growth in many countries.