IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wbk/wbrwps/8474.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Automation and labor market outcomes : the pivotal role of high-quality education

Author

Listed:
  • Bentaouet Kattan,Raja
  • Macdonald,Kevin Alan David
  • Patrinos,Harry Anthony

Abstract

Automation will be a boon or a catastrophe depending on whom you listen to. This paper proposes an overlapping-generations model with endogenous school choice in which the quality of a country's education system determines how well skill supply can respond to increased demand from automation and subsequently whether automation will be beneficial or detrimental. In this sense, education quality in the model offers a bridge between the optimistic and pessimistic perspectives on automation. In testing the model's assumptions, the paper finds evidence that educational attainment, cognitive skills, and select noncognitive skills are associated with avoiding automation-prone occupations. Consistent with the model's predictions, census data indicate that countries have historically relied most on these types of occupations at middle-income status. The model and empirical findings suggest that it is middle-income countries that are most vulnerable to automation if their education systems are unable to affect cognitive and noncognitive skills sufficiently. As a result, automation may herald a much different growth model for developing countries: one in which developing these skills is central.

Suggested Citation

  • Bentaouet Kattan,Raja & Macdonald,Kevin Alan David & Patrinos,Harry Anthony, 2018. "Automation and labor market outcomes : the pivotal role of high-quality education," Policy Research Working Paper Series 8474, The World Bank.
  • Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:8474
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/356581528983322638/pdf/WPS8474.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Linda Glawe & Helmut Wagner, 2020. "The Middle-Income Trap 2.0: The Increasing Role of Human Capital in the Age of Automation and Implications for Developing Asia* Abstract: We modify the concept of the middle-income trap (MIT) against ," Asian Economic Papers, MIT Press, vol. 19(3), pages 40-58, Fall.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:8474. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Roula I. Yazigi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dvewbus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.