중남미

Uruguay, like many other countries in the region, faces serious medium- and long-term challenges associated with two global megatrends: population aging and technological change. The objective of this report is to identify these opportunities, as well as the challenges that population aging and technological change pose for the Uruguayan economy, and to determine how they can be addressed through better-designed public policies. As productive sectors adopt technological innovations, labor demand should decline. Automation-based productive processes take over routine tasks traditionally performed by workers, resulting in a substitution effect that lowers the demand for labor. To take advantage of opportunities created by innovative technologies, workers need skills that allow them to perform efficiently in a new productive environment. The literature shows that the critical skills most highly in demand in coming years will be not technical, but high-order cognitive and socioemotional. Finally, labor regulations and social protection policies have an important role in labor market arrangements in this new context. On the one hand, regulations may hamper valuable innovations by interfering with the introduction of productive processes that did not exist when those regulations were drafted. This report contains five chapters. Chapter one discusses the demographic trends and explains how they motivate the analysis. Chapter two presents a conceptual framework for the different dimensions discussed in the book, and chapter three focuses on Uruguay, describing the recent evolution and current context. Chapter four offers a review of policies that authorities may implement for the issues discussed, and chapter five summarizes the conclusions.