Eight out of ten workers losing their jobs in advanced economies are being replaced by technology, not immigrants or workers in other countries via trade deals, the head of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) told the World Government Summit in Dubai on Tuesday.

In a session titled ‘The Outlook for Global Trade in a Hyperconnected World’, the WTO's director-general, Roberto Azevêdo, said that jobs "are not lost to trade or to immigrants, they are lost to new technology”.

According to a press release issued by the summit's organisers, Azevêdo said that '100 percent' of countries were not prepared for the impact that that the speed of technological change will have on their economies. "And they are not doing enough to get ready.”
He said that the pace of e-commerce was increasing, but that in many instances govermnents were focussing solely on the development of infrastrucutre such as roads, ports, and airports.

“We are changing from the era of the container to the era of the small packages. It’s not only about the infrastructure," Azevêdo said. "Often governments work on the infrastructure. But it’s also about the soft infrastructure and thinking about the future.

"You may have all the physical infrastructure in place, but if the institutions and the people who handle them don’t understand that they need to lower the costs, that they need to facilitate trade in this new era of the small package, you are going to be behind.”

In a separate session on autonomous vehicles, Jim Carroll, a futurist who runs JA Carroll Consulting, said that autonomous vehicles will have the ability to improve the throughput of existing highways and transport grids by up to five times through the use of new technologies such automobile engineering, robotics, artificial intelligence, big data and improved city designs.

“We are going to have to teach our cars how to travel in packs and talk to each other," he said.

Meanwhile, Dubai's Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) also used the World Government Summit as a platform to announce a new Dubai World Congress and Challenge for Self-Driving Transport.

The Challenge is a global competition aimed at broadening the use of self-driving transport by funding research into existing transport challenges such as traffic congestion, low public transport use and the "first and last mile" challenge of getting people from transport nodes to their destinations, the RTA's chairman and director-general Mattar Al Tayer said.

In a press release, he said the challenge provided "the largest global platform for companies, universities and R&D centres to roll out driverless transport scenarios and applications on Dubai roads".

Some $3 million of the prize money will be allocated to 'leading companies', $1.5 million will be reserved for start-ups and $600,000 for ideas from universities and academia.

The Congress, meanwhile, will be held in cooperation with Khalifa University and the New Cities Foundation in October 2019.

Further reading:

(Writing by Michael Fahy; Editing by Shane McGinley)

(michael.fahy@thomsonreuters.com)

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles


Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. The content does not provide tax, legal or investment advice or opinion regarding the suitability, value or profitability of any particular security, portfolio or investment strategy. Read our full disclaimer policy here.

© ZAWYA 2018