Comments on The Middle-Income Trap 2.0: The Increasing Role of Human Capital in the Age of Automation and Implications for Developing Asia

Abstract

Debin Ma, London School of Economics and Political Science: By linking the new ongoing literature on the economic impact of automation with that of the middle-income trap the paper meshes two related but distinct lines of study to come up with an insightful overview paper. This paper discusses everything at an extremely general level because it covers a vast array of countries (mostly in Asia) and draws on a wide set of relevant indicators mostly from secondary sources.There are, therefore, two major two problems with this paper. First, because of the obvious concern about the reliance on these highly aggregate indices from disparate sources, the paper should include some discussion on both the qualitative and quantitative aspect of these indicators and how comparable they might be across countries and periods.Second, because the paper also discusses everything at a highly aggregated and abstract level, it would have been desirable for the authors to present micro-level evidence to bolster the credibility of the discussion. For example, East Asian countries are characterized by widespread literacy and large-scale assembly production operations whereas South Asian countries have large class gaps in education (very literate and intellectual elites at the top, for example) and a comparative advantage in relatively small-scale high-tech and high-skill sectors. These micro-level distinctions are buried when one only looks at the aggregate statistics on years of schooling data and employment share.