Received 05.04.2024. Revised 14.07.2024. Accepted 29.07.2024.
Abstract. Over the past 30 years, the world has achieved significant success in the fight against global poverty. However, progress in reducing its scale varies greatly in different parts of the world. Today, the epicenter of this calamity lies in Sub-Saharan Africa. The concentration of poverty in several places on the planet does not make the study of sources and dynamics of this phenomenon any less relevant. It is simultaneously both the root cause and the consequence of many current global challenges. The article focuses on analyzing the connection between the dynamics of poverty and structural shifts in the economies of developing countries. The authors note that for a long time, an important mechanism for reducing poverty in poor countries was the outflow of unskilled labor from the agricultural sector to the industrial one. As long as labor-intensive technologies were used in industry, it effectively absorbed the uneducated agricultural population, increasing their income and lifting them out of poverty. However, innovative labor-saving technologies and the digitization of economy have slowed down this process.Modern economy requires fewer workers while placing high demands on the quality of human capital. Poor African countries, caught up amid global technological shifts, have faced major challenges. One of the main ones includes the low level of education and vocational training, as well as the absence of not only computer literacy but also basic literacy. Under such conditions, innovation cannot organically develop, create high-tech jobs, and contribute to poverty reduction. Our contribution to academic literature lies in the demonstration, based on empirical materials, of various models of reducing global poverty in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. We also draw attention to possible mechanisms of this reduction and their transformation against the backdrop of the implementation of modern advanced technologies.
Keywords: global poverty, structural shifts, new technologies, digitalization, Sub-Saharan Africa
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