Generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) holds immense potential to boost productivity growth and advance public service delivery, but it also raises profound concerns about massive labor disruptions and rising inequality. This note discusses how fiscal policies can be employed to steer the technology and its deployment in ways that serve humanity best while cushioning the negative labor market and distributional effects to broaden the gains. Given the vast uncertainty about the nature, impact, and speed of developments in gen AI, governments should take an agile approach that prepares them for both business as usual and highly disruptive scenarios.
Digitalization has the potential to bring great economic benefits, but it is also creating new challenges. This note focuses on trade in digitized products, its fiscal revenue implications, and the appropriate role for domestic and border tax instruments in this context. As digitized trade increases, in part replacing physical trade, developing countries that rely on tariff revenue to support fiscal capacity will face the difficult question of how best to tax these new trade flows and maintain fiscal balances. This note shows that, independently of the future trajectory of trade in digitized products, broad-based nondiscriminatory value-added taxes are preferrable to tariffs both from an economic efficiency and from a revenue standpoint. These taxes are also easier to implement and administer. In this context, the World Trade Organization (WTO) moratorium on customs duties on electronic transmission can help to effectively channel developing countries’ tax reform efforts in a more efficient direction. This transition would require further investment by the global community in modernizing the tax and customs infrastructure of developing countries to adequately meet revenue needs in the digital era.
Generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) holds immense potential to boost productivity growth and advance public service delivery, but it also raises profound concerns about massive labor disruptions and rising inequality. This note discusses how fiscal policies can be employed to steer the technology and its deployment in ways that serve humanity best while cushioning the negative labor market and distributional effects to broaden the gains. Given the vast uncertainty about the nature, impact, and speed of developments in gen AI, governments should take an agile approach that prepares them for both business as usual and highly disruptive scenarios.
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