Accelerate investments into building skills and improving transport to spread economic opportunity in Asia Pacific, CEOs say
What would enable more people to participate in, and benefit from, growth and trade in APEC economies? That’s a critical question for CEOs at a time when a confluence of new technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, are radically and rapidly reshaping how we work and live.
This so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) will impact how companies innovate, compete and, importantly, create more sustainable business growth that in turn can help build a more inclusive society.
So, for this year’s survey, we asked business leaders to pinpoint the more effective ways to accelerate inclusive growth across the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) region. The most important factors they told us are ‘expanded access to high-quality education at all levels’ and ‘improved transport’.
On the surface these two factors appear quite separate. Improving educational access is a direct way to widen economic opportunity, and businesses across Asia Pacific have an important role in training as they are activity shaping demand for future skillsets. Improving transport, on the other hand, is typically associated with driving faster economic growth, with more of an indirect benefit to the wider population. Many businesses might justifiably surmise they don’t have much of a part to play in classic infrastructure projects. However, both education and transport have one key thing in common – they are inexorably tied to the promise in 4IR to find new ways to solve difficult problems for society.
Consider first APEC’s need to expand access to high quality education at all levels. For the last three decades APEC countries like Japan, South Korea and China have become dominant players in global manufacturing while countries like Vietnam and Thailand have helped power the global retail and apparel industries.
The growth of robotic process automation and the promise of industrialised 3D printing will make the role of many thousands of manual assembly line workers redundant. Around 26% of existing jobs in China could be automated over the next 20 years, according to PwC research, but this is projected to be more than offset by job creation of 38%, largely as a result of a richer society with increased demand for products and services of all kinds.
So governments and business will need to work together to ensure existing and new workers have education and skillsets to succeed in a far more automated economy.
Working with machines will require a mix of different skills but APEC CEOs have no doubt that improving education around science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) is a high priority – 68% said they believe governments should be doing more to train young people in these areas. Their sentiments correlate with new PwC global research into the way business is tackling the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). The SDG Reporting Challenge finds that 48% of CEOs believe quality education (SDG 4) is a priority for their business (and the 7th most prioritised goal of all companies surveyed).
Improving education will also have a knock on effect for other sustainability issues relevant to the region such as expanded access to health care, reducing financial inequalities, ending poverty and hunger and achieving gender equality.
Transport as a conduit for sustainable urban living
In the same vein 4IR can help shape transport in a way that is sustainable and improves the lives of millions of new urban dwellers. Emerging economies are attracting more urban citizens than ever before and cities in Asia and Africa are forecast to absorb 90% of the world’s 2.5 billion new urbanites by 2050. Without adequate transport systems, millions of APEC citizens will increasingly find themselves deprived of access to fundamental necessities such as jobs, shops and markets, schools and hospitals.
PwC’s paper, Harnessing the 4IR for Sustainable Emerging Cities, published in collaboration with the World Economic Forum and Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, identified sustainable transport and logistics to increase mobility and connectivity as one of five core climate and environmental challenges that 4IR innovations could help solve.
Sustainably powered electric and even autonomous vehicles is one factor that could add real benefit for APEC populations. The use of small scale AI-controlled passenger bus have already been trialed in Singapore and China and, moving forward, mass transportation could be transformed by nascent technologies like hyperloop. In terms of freight, autonomous trucks have been trialed by one Chinese start up while many large corporates have introduced AI technologies to improve safety and emissions in the area of intermodal transportation. On the high seas, autonomous vessels also are poised to reduce accidents and carbon emissions through more efficient navigation.
Sustainable and smart transportation infrastructure will be just as important as vehicle innovation. In cities like Rio de Janeiro, municipal authorities have employed algorithms to ‘tame’ out of control traffic patterns and hence reduce emissions and pollution.
Building a more sustainable transportation system will also have a knock on effect for other important inclusion issues just as improving education will. By providing more people with more mobility and a dependable way of getting to work and accessing products it can help raise minimum wages, help stabilise food prices and expand access to health care – all inclusivity issues that APEC CEOs also highlight.
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