(2013), “Is technological progress a thing of the past?”, VoxEU article, 8 September 2013 and Brynjolfsson, E. and A. McAfee (2014), “The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies”. BIS central bankers’ speeches  5  an uphill battle, given the challenges of population aging, rising inequality, failing education systems and debt overhang.
The role of demographics is especially dominant here. As Charles Goodhart and colleagues (2015) have noted, recent decades have benefitted from a positive global labour supply shock, deriving from the baby-boomer generation in the 1970s, and from the integration and expansion of emerging markets as part of the global economy.