Future research directions

38 I N T R O D U C T I O N G L O B A L P R O D U C T I V I T Y

the low productivity of EMDE agricultural sectors and agriculture’s role as the primary employer in LICs, policies to raise productivity in this sector, such as actions to strengthen infrastructure and improve land property rights, could pay particularly significant dividends.

The study presents new analytical work on productivity but also points toward several avenues for future research.

Adverse shocks and the COVID-19 pandemic. Evidence that adverse events are likely to cause lasting productivity and output losses opens new research avenues for a more indepth analysis of propagation channels and socioeconomic impacts (chapter 3). This is particularly important in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Future research could refine the analysis of the intensity of the adverse events by constructing severity indexes for different types of events. In addition, a more detailed empirical assessment of the transmission channels is warranted. This could be explored by studying the effects of adverse shocks on different economic sectors as well as on consumption, investment, and FDI. This can also enable an assessment of the distributional and developmental implications of adverse events. Finally, more in-depth analysis of how policies explain differences in impacts, responses, and resilience to adverse shocks across countries would help prevent and mitigate future disasters.

Medium-term drivers of productivity growth. The broad-based slowdown of productivity growth has raised many questions on what is causing it. The research highlighted in chapter 2 has shown there are many drivers and correlates of productivity but that the main long-term drivers have changed over time, with some becoming more prominent and others less prominent as the structures of economies evolve. The analysis could be expanded to better understand the medium-term dynamics of productivity and how they may vary both within and across countries. Medium-term analysis can also help quantify the implications of COVID-19 on productivity growth.

Understanding convergence club transitions. Additional scrutiny of the drivers of transitions of economies into convergence clubs with higher productivity convergence trajectories can provide useful insights for policy makers about the conditions necessary for faster productivity growth. However, methodologies to isolate the period of transition, used in chapter 4, are currently underdeveloped and generally rely on comparing results over different estimation samples. Future research could place more focus on estimating more precise transition points between convergence clubs. Further research is required into strategies that could be used by EMDEs to develop capabilities in more advanced and complex sectors while safeguarding employment.

The future of automation in EMDEs. The analysis of the loss of employment from new productivity-improving technologies in chapter 6 is based on historical trends, during a period in which automation has primarily been concentrated in certain sectors in advanced economies. Future research could examine the role of cross-country wage