Top Indian economist Arvind Panagariya has told the United Nations that the world export market worth nearly $22 trillion is extremely large to have any adverse impact of protectionism. In a keynote address yesterday to the Second Committee of the UN General Assembly, Panagariya, 65, also played down the fears that automation would kill jobs.
Panagariya, who stepped down as the NITI Ayog vice chairman recently, is now back in the US as Professor of Economics and Jagdish Bhagwati Professor of Indian Political Economy at Columbia University. “My own personal view on this (automation) is that we often overstate, because we can see what jobs automation we destroy. But we cannot see what jobs automation will actually create,” he said, arguing that never in the history technological advancement has actually ended up cutting jobs. “It has made us all get busier and busier and where automation is the most, in industrialised countries, people are busier,” he said and added: "so historically, automation has never been able to made people less busy or labour markets more slack.”
To a question on the issue of rising protectionist threat, Panagariya said his own take is that the global market is extremely large. For instance, he said, the merchandise export market is $17 trillion, and another $5-6 trillion is the services export market, thus a total $22 trillion worth of market is the global market. What happens tomorrow to the size of this market -- it becomes $22 trillion or 25 trillion of 20 trillion -- is much of less valance than what individual countries can do to get a larger share, he noted.