Fumiharu Mineo, Kyoto University: This paper addresses the importance of human capital accumulation in emerging economies under the recent accelerated automation, by conceptualizing the mechanism of possible growth slowdown caused by shortage of suitable human capital, and by comparing emerging Asian economies with various relevant indices.
The paper redefines the so-called middle-income trap argument into its new version (MIT 2.0) under the recent wave of new industrialization, focusing on the increasing gap between changing employment circumstances and the insufficient speed of high-skilled human capital accumulation. The recent wave of automation makes it difficult for Asian countries to continue their high performance through the conventional catch-up and labor-intensive type industrialization strategy. Although automation will generally bring about a decrease in traditional labor demand, huge new labor demands will be created through productivity improvement, further capital accumulation, and the emergence of new tasks stimulated by the automation, according to the paper. The...