◼ ECONOMICS Bloomberg Businessweek June 24, 2019
41● Female workers in developing countries are most at risk
of losing their jobs to automationWomen on the Firing Line
THEBOTTOMLINE Two-thirdsofjobsin thedevelopingworld
are at risk from new technologies. In Southeast Asia, women in call
centers or back offices are particularly vulnerable to automation.The conventional wisdom used to be that
businesses in nations with low wages and growing
labor pools would have little incentive to invest in
robots and artificial intelligence. No longer. Two-
thirds of jobs in the developing world are at risk
fromthesetechnologies,accordingtotheWorld
Bank.AndinSoutheastAsiaatleast,womenwill
fareworsethanmen,losingmoreoftheexisting
jobsandlandingfewerofthehigher-skilledones
thatemerge.“Thatwaswhatreallystoodout—
womenarereallyathighrisk,”saysPhuHuynh,
an economist with the International Labour
OrganizationinBangkok.Heco-authoreda 2016
studythatconcludedthat61%ofworkingwomen
inCambodia,Indonesia,thePhilippines,Thailand,
andVietnamareonshakygroundasnewtechnol-
ogiesbecomemorepervasive.
It’sa globalphenomenon.“Women,onaverage,
performmoreroutineorcodifiabletasksthanmen
acrossallsectorsandoccupations,”accordingtoan
InternationalMonetaryFundpaperfromOctober.
But newtechnologies also createentirely
newoccupationswithhigherwages.“Thestory
iswaymorecomplexthanpeoplerealize,”says
SameerKhatiwada,aneconomistattheAsian
DevelopmentBankwhoco-authored a recent
report on the impact of successive waves of auto-
mation on employment in Asia. For one thing, ris-
ing incomes will fuel demand for more products
and services, creating jobs even in sectors with
high degrees of automation, he says.
Male applicants will have an edge in landing
those new positions, however. While younger
women in Asia have enjoyed huge gains in edu-
cation and basic cognitive skills training, they still
lag men in technical training, science, technol-
ogy, engineering, and mathematics, even in more
advanced nations such as Singapore and South
Korea, says Cyn-Young Park, an analyst in the ADB’s
Economic Research and Regional Cooperation
Department. “They are very much entrenched
in the name of culture, in the name of religion, in
the name of so many traditional things,” she says.
�Henry Hoenig, with Ditas Lopez and Claire Jiao● Relativerisk of job
beingautomated
◼Women
◼ MenPhilippines2.4 1.02.3 1.0Vietnam1.6 1.0Cambodia1.5 1.0Thailand1.2 1.0IndonesiaIt’s an overall loosening of monetary policy, which is
good for growth in both countries, says Brad Setser,
a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“In principle,” he says, “that’s just a coordinated eas-
ing that increases the level of demand.”
Trump’s argument that China is manipulating
its currency is even weaker than his case against
Europe. Far from pushing down the value of the
yuan, the People’s Bank of China has been coun-
tering market forces to slow its decline. China has
kept the benchmark one-year lending rate at 4.35%,
where it’s been since October 2015, in spite of eco-
nomic softness that might seem to justify a cut. Also,
China’s holdings of foreign reserves haven’t risen
appreciably, as they would if China were trying to
drive down the yuan by selling it and buying other
currencies. “The available evidence suggests that
China is trying to avoid a currency war,” Setser says.
Chinese leaders don’t want a weaker currency,
even if it gives a short-run economic boost, says Marc
Chandler,chiefmarketstrategistatBannockburn
GlobalForexLLCinNewYork.Thecountry’slong-
runobjectivesare“tomoveupthevalue-added
chain”andencouragetheChinese“toworksmarter,
notharder,”Chandlerwroteina June 18 noteto
clients. Competing on price through a cheap yuan
would keep China stuck in its low-tech past.
How would anyone know if a country really
were playing unfair by depreciating its currency?
One telltale sign is the central bank buying lots
of foreign currency to reduce its own currency’s
value, even though the country has a big surplus
in trade and investment income with the rest of the
world. China was guilty of that behavior up until
early 2014. Singapore, South Korea, and Thailand
have also intervened at various times in recent
years to suppress their currencies’ value.
Today one of the chief currency offenders is
Taiwan, Setser wrote in a June 18 research note.
The Taiwanese central bank says it had $464 bil-
lion in foreign exchange at the end of May. That’s
more than the holdings of bigger nations such as
Brazil, Germany, and India. (According to a descrip-
tion on the central bank’s website, the value of the
Taiwan dollar is determined by forces of supply and
demand, though “when the market is disrupted by
seasonal or irregular factors, the Bank will step in.”)
It seems, then, that Trump may be pointing his
finger in the wrong direction. But since the president
seems to have an expansive view of what constitutes
unfair trading practices, the tweets against Europe,
China,andothersarelikelytocontinue.�PeterCoy
THE BOTTOM LINE Trump says the U.S.’s biggest trading
partners are waging a currency war to gain economic advantage.
There’s little evidence to support his case.