On emissions: income generation for low-income country workers clearly does far more for welfare than reductions in the embodied emissions of what they produce. The EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism is a live example of getting this wrong. It applies the same compliance burden to LIC exporters as to wealthy ones, with no exemption or reduction for countries whose marginal ton of emissions is funding the income that lifts households out of poverty. The result is a regressive tax on exactly the structural transformation that should be subsidized.
On the AI window: agree that AI automation of knowledge work will, if anything, raise the relative value of in-person physical labor, and that the resulting growth expands demand for the goods and in-person services that labor produces. There is a narrow window to build the export manufacturing bases and labor mobility pathways to enable the African workforce to ride that wave towards income convergence.
Strong agreement on both points.
On emissions: income generation for low-income country workers clearly does far more for welfare than reductions in the embodied emissions of what they produce. The EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism is a live example of getting this wrong. It applies the same compliance burden to LIC exporters as to wealthy ones, with no exemption or reduction for countries whose marginal ton of emissions is funding the income that lifts households out of poverty. The result is a regressive tax on exactly the structural transformation that should be subsidized.
On the AI window: agree that AI automation of knowledge work will, if anything, raise the relative value of in-person physical labor, and that the resulting growth expands demand for the goods and in-person services that labor produces. There is a narrow window to build the export manufacturing bases and labor mobility pathways to enable the African workforce to ride that wave towards income convergence.