Europe

Germany implemented a minimum wage of €8.50 in 2015, impacting 15 percent of the country’s workers. A new study puts to rest concerns that the wage increases would kill jobs, showing that the policy had no impact on the unemployment rate of low-income workers.

The Center for Data Innovation has submitted comments in response to the public consultation of the European Commission, which is gathering feedback to inform its gender equality strategy 2020-2024.

By the end of the Cold War, West Germany’s productivity was 3.6 times larger than East Germany’s. Utilizing the complete set of industrial information provided to East Germany between 1970 and 1989 by informants in West Germany, researchers have estimated that East Germany’s productivity would have been 10.3 percent lower in 1989 without this espionage.

The eCommerce Directive—a critical building block of the EU’s digital economy—is in need of modernization, but updates should continue to remove obstacles to online commerce and provide legal certainty to businesses and citizens.

The early designers of the Internet quickly realized that as the number of domain names flourished, there was a need for tracking domain name owners to resolve questions and conflicts that might arise. To that end, they created WHOIS, a public database with the names, phone numbers, email addresses, and mailing addresses of registered domain owners and operators.

Europe must harness the power of digital innovation not just to increase economic growth and expand prosperity, but also to address important societal challenges related to the environment, public health, transportation, and other pressing concerns.

The UK currently has many advantages in developing and using AI, but as Michael McLaughlin writes for SC Magazine, it will fall behind if it doesn’t take the right steps to secure its AI leadership.

In an op-ed for New Europe, Eline Chivot writes that AI can actually help reduce gender bias and improve social fairness in Europe.

Discussions about job losses from automation tend to assume that innovation will overwhelmingly displace low-skill workers. But this view is misguided because it fails to recognize that low-skill jobs are the least profitable for companies to make obsolete.

France’s digital services tax, which other nations also are considering, represents a radical departure from current practice and would greatly complicate ongoing efforts by the OECD to negotiate changes to the international tax regime by 2020.

Daniel Castro writes for Euronews, Europe will be left behind in AI if it focuses on ethics rather than developing the best technology.

The UK can simultaneously promote data-driven innovations for all, develop the types of skills required for the digital economy, support the private sector’s use of data to increase productivity, and improve public services through appropriate sharing and use of data within government, as well as between government and the private sector.