James Manyika

The AI technological competition globally rapidly seems to have come down to be a race between the US, led by the US, but increasingly by China.

And others are largely being left behind.

And that includes, in some cases, parts of Europe, but for sure, parts of the poor developing economies.

So the question is, in a future in which capacity for technology is developing at different paces, dramatically different paces for different countries,

and the nature of globalization itself is changing, what is the path for these poor developing countries?

I think that's a very tough question that we don't have very many good answers for, by the way.

But we are just people who think about developing economies and developing economies themselves.

I think that's one of the tough challenges, I think, for the next several decades of the 21st century.

Well, I think on the question of these kind of left-behind countries and economies, as I said, these are topics we're trying to research and understand.

I don't think we have any kind of pat, simple solutions to them.

We do know, though, that in fact, some of the things, if you look at the pattern, a lot of our work is very empirical.

We're typically looking at what has happened and what is actually happening on the ground.

One of the things that you do see for developing economies is that

The developing economies that are part of a regional ecosystem, either because of their value chains and supply chains.

So take the case of a country like Vietnam.

It's kind of in the value chain ecosystem around China, for example.

So it benefits from being developed.

a participant or an input into the Chinese value chain.

So when you have countries, and you could argue that's what's happened with countries like Mexico and a few others.

So there's something about being a participant in the value chains or supply chains of these that are emerging somewhat regionally, actually.