Commentary
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April 26, 2024|Blogs
Measuring Digital Literacy Gaps is the First Step to Closing Them
Digital literacy is now a necessary skill on par with the ability to read or write. Yet, we have no clear system of measuring this type of literacy rate or comprehensive dataset that tells us where the U.S. population stands. Instead, there’s a piecemeal landscape of measuring digital literacy. Studies often cover members of particular groups rather than the population at large, and without a consensus on the measurement of universal digital literacy rates, we have no clear way of taking a data-driven approach to the problem—which is necessary if we want to solve it.
April 25, 2024|Blogs
Growing Evidence Shows Importance of AI for Health Care
As demographic change and aging populations in many Western countries entail higher relative health-care burdens, AI’s support in diagnosis, drug development, and health-care operations may serve as a much-needed remedy.
April 22, 2024|Blogs
Fact of the Week: Internet Access Reduced Women’s Job Losses in Latin America During COVID-19
A recent working paper found that women in Latin America and the Caribbean with internet access had a 5 percent lower rate of job pre-pandemic job loss and about a 4 percent increase in their labor force participation rate than those without internet.
April 19, 2024|Blogs
Canada’s 2024 Federal Budget: The Good, the Bad, and the Maybe for Innovation, Productivity, and Competitiveness
The word “innovation” appears a total of 97 times and “productivity” 63 times in Canada’s 2024 federal budget, and many measures targeted towards innovation and productivity reflect that focus. However, some of the funds being disbursed are tangential at best to actually addressing Canada’s declining productivity and supporting Canada’s innovation ecosystem.
April 19, 2024|Blogs
Accelerating Digital Technology Adoption Among U.S. Small and Medium-Sized Manufacturers
Helping SME manufacturers adopt digital technologies will boost productivity, expand output, and allow them to simultaneously raise wages, compete in global markets, and be more flexible in their production processes.
April 19, 2024|Blogs
Oklahoma’s Failure in Digital IDs Highlights Lesson in Building Accessibility From the Start
Given that more than 19 states are in the process of implementing digital IDs, Oklahoma serves as a cautionary tale on the importance of building accessibility into the system from the beginning.
April 17, 2024|Blogs
Why The EU Should Look To Estonia To Achieve Its Vision For A Digital Europe
At the start of its digital transformation, Estonia had a GDP per capita of $3,134. By 2022, it was $28,247—an increase of more than 800 percent in less than 30 years. Its journey holds lessons for the EU.
April 15, 2024|Blogs
Fact of the Week: Participation in Global Value Chains Raises Firms’ Labor Productivity by 20 Percent
A recent working paper found that, overall, global value chain participation raises labor productivity by about 20 percent.
April 13, 2024|Blogs
Congress Should Fund the Creation of a Similarity Checker for Music
A landmark ruling in 2015 made it harder for artists and record labels to determine where permissible influence and interpolation become impermissible appropriation and plagiarism. Congress should make things more consistent, accurate, and fair by directing the Copyright Office to launch a competition for the private sector to come up with an AI-enabled tool to compare how similar a musical composition or recording is to existing copyright-protected works.
April 12, 2024|Blogs
Large Firms Generate Positive Productivity and Non-Productivity Spillovers for Their Suppliers
Policymakers should not follow neo-Brandeisian calls to break up large companies because such actions will only hurt the economy and small firms