How digital transformation is driving economic change

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog (and book) by Zia Qureshi: “We are living in a time of exciting technological innovations. Digital technologies are driving transformative change. Economic paradigms are shifting. The new technologies are reshaping product and factor markets and profoundly altering business and work. The latest advances in artificial intelligence and related innovations are expanding the frontiers of the digital revolution. Digital transformation is accelerating in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The future is arriving faster than expected.

A recently published book, “Shifting Paradigms: Growth, Finance, Jobs, and Inequality in the Digital Economy,” examines the implications of the unfolding digital metamorphosis for economies and public policy agendas….

Firms at the technological frontier have broken away from the rest, acquiring dominance in increasingly concentrated markets and capturing the lion’s share of the returns from the new technologies. While productivity growth in these firms has been strong, it has stagnated or slowed in other firms, depressing aggregate productivity growth. Increasing automation of low- to middle-skill tasks has shifted labor demand toward higher-level skills, hurting wages and jobs at the lower end of the skill spectrum. With the new technologies favoring capital, winner-take-all business outcomes, and higher-level skills, the distribution of both capital and labor income has tended to become more unequal, and income has been shifting from labor to capital.

One important reason for these outcomes is that policies and institutions have been slow to adjust to the unfolding transformations. To realize the promise of today’s smart machines, policies need to be smarter too. They must be more responsive to change to fully capture potential gains in productivity and economic growth and address rising inequality as technological disruptions create winners and losers.

As technology reshapes markets and alters growth and distributional dynamics, policies must ensure that markets remain inclusive and support wide access to the new opportunities for firms and workers. The digital economy must be broadened to disseminate new technologies and opportunities to smaller firms and wider segments of the labor force…(More)”.

The Biden Administration Embraces “Democracy Affirming Technologies”

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Marc Rotenberg: “…But amidst the ongoing struggle between declining democracies and emerging authoritarian governments, the Democracy Summit was notable for at least one new initiative – the support for democracy affirming technology. According to the White House, the initiative “aims to galvanize worldwide a new class of technologies” that can support democratic values.  The White House plan is to bring together innovators, investors, researchers, and entrepreneurs to “embed democratic values.”  The President’s top science advisor Eric Lander provided more detail. Democratic values, he said, include “privacy, freedom of expression, access to information, transparency, fairness, inclusion, and equity.”

In order to spur more rapid technological progress the White House Office of Science and Technology announced three Grand Challenges for Democracy-Affirming Technologies. They are:

  • A collaboration between U.S. and UK agencies to promote “privacy enhancing technologies” that “harness the power of data in a secure manner that protects privacy and intellectual property, enabling cross-border and cross-sector collaboration to solve shared challenges.”
  • Censorship circumvention tools, based on peer-to-peer techniques that enable content-sharing and communication without an Internet or cellular connection. The Open Technology Fund, an independent NGO, will invite international participants to compete on promising P2P technologies to counter Internet shutdowns.
  • A Global Entrepreneurship Challenge will seek to identify entrepreneurs who build and advance democracy-affirming technologies through a set of regional startup and scaleup competitions in countries spanning the democratic world. According to the White House, specific areas of innovation may include: data for policymaking, responsible AI and machine learning, fighting misinformation, and advancing government transparency and accessibility of government data and services.

USAID Administrator Samantha Powers said her agency would spend 20 million annually to expand digital democracy work. “We’ll use these funds to help partner nations align their rules governing the use of technology with democratic principles and respect for human rights,” said the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Notably, Powers also said the U.S. will take a closer look at export practices to “prevent technologies from falling into hands that would misuse them.” The U.S., along with Denmark, Norway, and Australia, will launch a new Export Controls and Human Rights Initiative. Powers also seeks to align surveillance practices of democratic nations with the Universal Declaration for Human Rights….(More)”.

Cities and the Climate-Data Gap

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Robert Muggah and Carlo Ratti: “With cities facing disastrous climate stresses and shocks in the coming years, one would think they would be rushing to implement mitigation and adaptation strategies. Yet most urban residents are only dimly aware of the risks, because their cities’ mayors, managers, and councils are not collecting or analyzing the right kinds of information.

With more governments adopting strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions, cities everywhere need to get better at collecting and interpreting climate data. More than 11,000 cities have already signed up to a global covenant to tackle climate change and manage the transition to clean energy, and many aim to achieve net-zero emissions before their national counterparts do. Yet virtually all of them still lack the basic tools for measuring progress.

Closing this gap has become urgent, because climate change is already disrupting cities around the world. Cities on almost every continent are being ravaged by heat waves, fires, typhoons, and hurricanes. Coastal cities are being battered by severe flooding connected to sea-level rise. And some megacities and their sprawling peripheries are being reconsidered altogether, as in the case of Indonesia’s $34 billion plan to move its capital from Jakarta to Borneo by 2024.

Worse, while many subnational governments are setting ambitious new green targets, over 40% of cities (home to some 400 million people) still have no meaningful climate-preparedness strategy. And this share is even lower in Africa and Asia – where an estimated 90% of all future urbanization in the next three decades is expected to occur.

We know that climate-preparedness plans are closely correlated with investment in climate action including nature-based solutions and systematic resilience. But strategies alone are not enough. We also need to scale up data-driven monitoring platforms. Powered by satellites and sensors, these systems can track temperatures inside and outside buildings, alert city dwellers to air-quality issues, and provide high-resolution information on concentrations of specific GHGs (carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide) and particulate matter…(More)”.

A time for humble governments

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Juha Leppänen: “Let’s face it. During the last decade, liberal democracies have not been especially successful in steering societies through our urgent, collective problems. This is reflected in the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer Spring Update: A World in Trauma: Democratic governments are less trusted in general by their own citizens. While some governments have fared better than others, the trend is clear…

Humility entails both a willingness to listen to different opinions, and a capacity to review one’s own actions in light of new insights. True humility does not need to be deferential. But embracing humility legitimises leadership by cultivating stronger relationships and greater trust among other political and societal stakeholders — particularly with those with different perspectives. In doing so, it can facilitate long-term action and ensure policies are much more resilient in the face of uncertainty.

There are several core steps to establishing humble governance:

  • Some common ground is better than none, so strike a thin consensus with the opposition around a broad framework goal. For example, consider carbon neutrality targets. To begin with, forging consensus does not require locking down on the details of how and what. Take emissions in agriculture. In this case all that is needed is general agreement that significant cuts in CO2 emissions in this sector are necessary in order to hit our national net zero goal. While this can be harder in extremely polarised environments, a thin consensus of some sort usually can be built on any problem that is already widely recognised — no matter how small. This is even the case in political environments dominated by populist leaders.
  • Devolve problem-solving systemically. First, set aside hammering out blueprints and focus on issuing a broad launch plan, backed by a robust process for governmental decision-making. Look for intelligent incentives to prompt collaboration. In the carbon neutrality example, this would begin by identifying where the most critical potential tensions or jurisdictional disputes lie. Since local stakeholders tend to want to resolve tensions locally, give them a clear role in the planning. Divide up responsibility for achieving goals across sectors of the economy, identify key stakeholders needed at the table in each sector, and create a procedure for reviewing progress. Collaboration can be incentivised by offering those who participate the ability, say, to influence future regulations, or by penalising those who refuse to take part.
  • Revise framework goals through robust feedback mechanisms. A truly humble government’s steering documents should be seen as living documents, rather than definitive blueprints. There should be regular consultation with stakeholders on progress, and elected representatives should review the progress on the original problem statement and how success is defined. Where needed, the government in power can use this process to decide whether to reopen discussions with the opposition about how to revise the current goals…(More)”.

The unmet potential of open data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Jane Bambauer: “Open Data holds great promise — and more than thought leaders appreciate. 

Open access to data can lead to a much richer and more diverse range of research and development, hastening innovation. That’s why scientific journals are asking authors to make their data available, why governments are making publicly held records open by default, and why even private companies provide subsets of their data for general research use. Facebook, for example, launched an effort to provide research data that could be used to study the impact of social networks on election outcomes. 

Yet none of these moves have significantly changed the landscape. Because of lingering skepticism and some legitimate anxieties, we have not yet democratized access to Big Data.

There are a few well-trodden explanations for this failure — or this tragedy of the anti-commons — but none should dissuade us from pushing forward….

Finally, creating the infrastructure required to clean data, link it to other data sources, and make it useful for the most valuable research questions will not happen without a significant investment from somebody, be it the government or a private foundation. As Stefaan Verhulst, Andrew Zahuranec, and Andrew Young have explained, creating a useful data commons requires much more infrastructure and cultural buy-in than one might think. 

From my perspective, however, the greatest impediment to the open data movement has been a lack of vision within the intelligentsia. Outside a few domains like public health, intellectuals continue to traffic in and thrive on anecdotes and narratives. They have not perceived or fully embraced how access to broad and highly diverse data could radically change newsgathering (we could observe purchasing or social media data in real time), market competition (imagine designing a new robot using data collected from Uber’s autonomous cars), and responsive government (we could directly test claims of cause and effect related to highly salient issues during election time). 

With a quiet accumulation of use cases and increasing competence in handling and digesting data, we will eventually reach a tipping point where the appetite for more useful research data will outweigh the concerns and inertia that have bogged down progress in the open data movement…(More)”.

The risks and rewards of real-time data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by David Pringle: “Unlike many valuable resources, real-time data is both abundant and growing rapidly. But it also needs to be handled with great care.

That was one of the key takeaways from an online workshop produced by Science|Business’ Data Rules group, which explored what the rapid growth in real-time data means for artificial intelligence (AI). Real-time data is increasingly feeding machine learning systems that then adjust the algorithms they use to make decisions, such as which news item to display on your screen or which product to recommend.  

“With AI, especially, you want to make sure that the data that you have is consistent, replicable and also valid,” noted Chris Atherton, senior research engagement officer at GÉANT, who described how his organisation transmits data captured by the European Space Agency’s satellites to researchers across the world. He explained that the images of earth taken by satellites are initially processed at three levels to correct for the atmospheric conditions at the time, the angle of the viewpoint and other variables, before being made more widely available for researchers and users to process further. The satellite data is also “validated against ground-based sources…in-situ data to make sure that it is actually giving you a reliable reading,” Atherton added.

Depending on the orbit of the satellites and the equipment involved, the processing can take a few hours or a few days before it is made available to the wider public.  One way to speed things up post publication is to place the pre-processed data into so-called data cubes, Atherton noted, which can then be integrated with AI systems. “You can send queries to the data cube itself rather than having to download the data directly to your own location to process it on your machine,” he explained….(More)”.

Data Portals and Citizen Engagement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Series of blogs by Tim Davies: “Portals have been an integral part of the open data movement. They provided a space for publishing and curation of data for governments (usually), and a space to discover and access data for users (often individuals, civil society organisations or sometimes private sector organisations building services or deriving insights from this data). 

While many data portals are still maintained, and while some of them enable access to a sizeable amount of data, portals face some big questions in the decade ahead:

  1. Are open data portals still fit for purpose (and if so, which purpose)?
  2. Do open data portals still “make sense” in this decade, or are they a public sector anomaly in a context when data lakes, data meshes, data platforms are adopted across industry? Is there a minimum viable spec for a future-proof open data “portal”?
  3. What roles and activities have emerged around data platforms and portals that deserve to be codified and supported by the future type of platforms?
  4. Could re-imagined open data “platforms” create change in the role of the public service organisation with regards to data (from publisher to… steward?)?
  5. How can a new generation of portals or data platforms better support citizen engagement and civic participation?
  6. What differences are there between the private and public approaches, and why? Does any difference introduce any significant dynamics in private / public open data ecosystems?…(More)”.

Strengthening CRVS Systems to Improve Migration Policy: A Promising Innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Tawheeda Wahabzada and Deirdre Appel: “Migration is one of the most pressing issues of our time and innovation for migration policy can take on several different shapes to help solve challenges. It is seen through radical technological breakthrough such as biometric identifiers that completely transform the status quo as well as technological disruptions like mobile phone fund transforms that alter an existing process. There is also incremental innovation, or the gradual improvement of an existing process or institution even. Regardless of where the fall on the spectrum, their innovative applications are all relevant to migration policy.

Incremental innovation for civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) systems can greatly benefit migrants and the policymakers trying to help them. According to World Health Organization, a well-functioning CRVS system registers all births and deaths, issues birth and death certificates, and compiles and disseminates vital statistics, including cause of death information. It may also record marriages and divorces. Each of these services brings a world of crucial advantages. But despite the social and legal benefits for individuals, especially migrants, these systems remain underfunded and under functioning. More than 100 low and middle-income countries lack functional CRVS systems and about one-third of all births are not registered. This amounts to more than one billion people without a legal identity leaving them unable to prove who they are and creating serious barriers to access health, education, financial, and other social services.

Throughout countries in Africa, there are great differences in CRVS coverage, where birth coverage ranges from above 90 percent in some North African countries to under 50 percent across several countries in different regions; and with death registration having greater gaps with either no information or lower coverage rates. For countries with low functioning CRVS systems, potential migrants from these countries could face additional obstacles in obtaining birth certificates and proof of identification….(More)”. See also https://data4migration.org/blog/

“If Everybody’s White, There Can’t Be Any Racial Bias”: The Disappearance of Hispanic Drivers From Traffic Records

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Richard A. Webster: “When sheriff’s deputies in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, pulled over Octavio Lopez for an expired inspection tag in 2018, they wrote on his traffic ticket that he is white. Lopez, who is from Nicaragua, is Hispanic and speaks only Spanish, said his wife.

In fact, of the 167 tickets issued by deputies to drivers with the last name Lopez over a nearly six-year span, not one of the motorists was labeled as Hispanic, according to records provided by the Jefferson Parish clerk of court. The same was true of the 252 tickets issued to people with the last name of Rodriguez, 234 named Martinez, 223 with the last name Hernandez and 189 with the surname Garcia.

This kind of misidentification is widespread — and not without harm. Across America, law enforcement agencies have been accused of targeting Hispanic drivers, failing to collect data on those traffic stops, and covering up potential officer misconduct and aggressive immigration enforcement by identifying people as white on tickets.

“If everybody’s white, there can’t be any racial bias,” Frank Baumgartner, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina of Chapel Hill, told WWNO/WRKF and ProPublica.

Nationally, states have tried to patch this data loophole and tighten controls against racial profiling. In recent years, legislators have passed widely hailed traffic stop data-collection laws in California, Colorado, Illinois, Oregon, Virginia and Washington, D.C. This April, Alabama became the 22nd state to enact similar legislation.

Though Louisiana has had its own data-collection requirement for two decades, it contains a loophole unlike any other state: It exempts law enforcement agencies from collecting and delivering data to the state if they have an anti-racial-profiling policy in place. This has rendered the law essentially worthless, said Josh Parker, a senior staff attorney at the Policing Project, a public safety research nonprofit at the New York University School of Law.

Louisiana State Rep. Royce Duplessis, D-New Orleans, attempted to remove the exemption two years ago, but law enforcement agencies protested. Instead, he was forced to convene a task force to study the issue, which thus far hasn’t produced any results, he said.

“They don’t want the data because they know what it would reveal,” Duplessis said of law enforcement agencies….(More)”.

How digital minilaterals can revive international cooperation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Tanya Filer and Antonio Weiss: “From London to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, calls to “reimagine” or “revive” multilateralism have been a dime a dozen this year. The global upheaval of COVID-19 and emerging megatrends—from the climate crisis to global population growth—have afforded a new urgency to international cooperation and highlighted a growing sclerosis within multilateralism that even its greatest proponents admit. 

While these calls—and the rethinking they are beginning to provoke—are crucial, a truly new and nuanced multilateralism will require room for other models too. As we described in a paper published last year at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, digital minilaterals are providing a new model for international cooperation. Made up of small, trust-based, innovation-oriented networks, digital minilaterals use digital culture, practices, processes, and technologies as tools to advance peer learning, support, and cooperation between governments. 

Though far removed from great power politics, digital minilaterals are beginning to help nation-states navigate an environment of rapid technological change and problems of complex systems, including through facilitating peer-learning, sharing code base, and deliberating on major ethical questions, such as the appropriate use of artificial intelligence in society. Digital minilateralism is providing a decentralized form of global cooperation and could help revive multilateralism. To be truly effective, digital minilaterals must place as much emphasis on common values as on pooled knowledge, but it remains to be seen whether these new diplomatic groupings will deliver on their promise….(More)”.