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FIGURE 3.14 About Two-Thirds of All Online Freelancers Who Completed Projects on Five of the Largest English-Language Online Freelancing Platforms Live in LMICs Supply of online freelancers, top 20 countries, June 2017–October 2020 India Bangladesh Pakistan United States Philippines United Kingdom China Ukraine Russian Federation Egypt, Arab Rep. Canada Sri Lanka Kenya Indonesia Australia Nigeria Vietnam Romania Serbia Venezuela, RB 0

100

Workers, millions HICs

LMICs

Source: Online Labor Index Worker Supplement of the iLabor Project, Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford, https:// ilabour.oii.ox.ac.uk/online-labour-index/. Note: Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), by World Bank income group classifications, had 1994 gross national income (GNI) of less than US$8,955. High-income countries (HICs) had GNI exceeding US$8,955 in 1994.

Another study of online freelancing contracts on Upwork—the largest online freelancing platform in 2016—found that the largest buyers were (in this order) the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, while the largest suppliers were the Philippines, India, and Bangladesh (Horton, Kerr, and Stanton 2017). The online gig economy is therefore associated with the productivity benefits that result from offshoring services tasks to lower-cost locations. Fewer language constraints, bigger pool of online freelancers. These patterns reflect the importance of language considerations: much of the demand for Englishlanguage online o utsourcing from high-income countries is met by suppliers in South Asia, where English is the preferred language for business transactions. This importance of the English language, however, diminishes with the diffusion of AI-enabled machine translation. Brynjolfsson, Hui, and Liu (2019) studied the effects of eBay’s machine translation system, eMT, on exports.15 They find that US exports to Spanish-speaking Latin American countries increased by 17.5–20.9 percent on eBay after adoption of eMT.16 Will Technology Make the Twain Meet? A Changing Productivity-Jobs Dichotomy in Services

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Articles inside

Inform the Priorities in the 4Ts Agenda

Highest Forward Linkages across Sectors

Practices Is Associated with Higher Sales per Employee

Countries with Higher Tertiary Enrollment Rates

Their Lack of ICT Skills Is a Constraint to Employment or Higher Earnings

B5.2.2 Product Market Regulation in Network and Professional Services Is Higher in LMICs Than in HICs—and Highest in Rail Transportation and Legal Services in Both Groups of Countries

Can Be Mapped to Each of the 4Ts, but Some of the Relationships Overlap

Forward and Backward Linkages to Other Sectors Are Included

Intensity Have Both Roughly Tripled

Attributable to Services Inputs

Subsector Groups to Serve Domestic Intermediate Demand

Exports from LMICs

Services Exports

Skill-Intensive Social Services, Especially through FDI

Labor Productivity

Industrialization

B3.3.1 COVID-19 Has Accelerated the Use of Digital Technologies and Home-Based Work Most among Firms in Global Innovator Services

4.4 Services That Predominantly Serve Final Demand Are Less Exported

of the Largest English-Language Online Freelancing Platforms Live in LMICs B3.2.1 Most ICT Firms Predict an Increase in Employment for Highly Skilled

Discernible Increase among Firms in Global Innovator Services

3.9 AI or ML Software Is Used More Widely in High-Income Countries

Services and Skill-Intensive Social Services

in the Number of Online Freelancers

S.1 Examples of More Careful Price Measurement for Services

2B.1 Alternative Measures of Scale Confirm That Scale Is Lower in Most Services Subsectors Than in Manufacturing, Except in Administrative and Support Services

2A.1 Overview of Firm-Level Data

2.19 Services Are More Likely Than Manufacturers to Be Intensive in ICT Capital

Men and Women

B2.2.2 Household Surveys Show That, on Average, 38 Percent of Services Workers Stopped Working in 2020

B2.1.2 The Importance of Informality in Services Relative to Manufacturing Is Most Pronounced When Comparing Shares of Employment and Value Added

2.11 Dispersion in Labor Productivity Is Higher in Services Than in Manufacturing

Average ICT and Manufacturing Establishments Are Close in Size

B2.1.1 Most Informal Enterprises Operate in Retail Services

1A.1 Service Subsectors, by UN ISIC Rev. 4 Classification

Income Is Driven by Retail Trade

“Commercial Presence” Abroad, but “Cross-Border Supply” and “Consumption Abroad” Matter for Some Subsectors

Employ Informal Workers

Lower in Services Than in Manufacturing

Industry to Aggregate Labor Productivity Growth since the 1990s

Goods in Their Implications for Productivity and Jobs, but These Are Changing with the Advent of Digital Technologies

and Low-Skill Jobs

the 1990s