Abstract
The objective of this study is to explore the impact of electronic commerce on employment rate for a sample covering the whole 27 Member States of the European Union (EU-27), from 2010 to 2019. Moreover, this research explores the clusters of nations with reference to electronic commerce adoption and employment rate dynamics. The outcomes of cluster analysis show that Western Europe reveals the most developed e-commerce marketplace in EU-27, shown by Internet accessibility and high penetration rate of digital tools, and the lowest figures are registered in the Eastern part of Europe. Furthermore, the empirical findings of the panel data fixed-effects and the generalized least squares regressions suggest that electronic commerce influences employment rate positively. By including country-level control variables (real GDP growth rate, research and development expenditure, employed ICT specialists, enterprises with Internet access), the outcomes reveal that one percentage change in enterprises’ total turnover from e-commerce sales, enterprises’ turnover from web sales, and enterprises with e-commerce sales of at least 1% turnover will increase employment rate by 0.205, 0.258, and 0.350 percentage points. Furthermore, the econometric evidence from the method of moments quantile regression models with fixed effects reinforces our findings. Enterprises’ total turnover from e-commerce sales and the percentage of enterprises with e-commerce sales of at least 1% turnover positively influence employment rate for all quintiles, but in the case of enterprises’ turnover from web sales, the effect is positive only for the quintiles ranging from 0.5–0.8.
Highlights
Technological development, automation, and digitalization are becoming more widespread in all areas of activity, causing some areas of the population to have lost their jobs recently, causing great concerns among people who often ask: Will a computer or a robot replace humans for many jobs? Will digitalization decrease vacancies? Will unemployment increase? Will the employment rate decrease?Given that the indicators that influence employment rate reflect the ability of the economy to generate opportunities and employment solutions for the population [1], they must be the goal of government or private policies, to influence the economic development of countries or regions under sustainability principles
Numerous studies have analyzed the link between economic development, measured by the Gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and the employment rate in the European Union (EU) countries, and have shown that economic development depends on the employment rate [73,74,75] in a different way, according to the level of development of a country
We have discussed the results of several studies highlighting that economic development, the value of GDP per capita, increases along with technological progress and the widespread digitalization of all areas of our lives, which could lead to the replacement of human capital and, to the decrease of the employment rate
Summary
Technological development, automation, and digitalization are becoming more widespread in all areas of activity, causing some areas of the population to have lost their jobs recently, causing great concerns among people who often ask: Will a computer or a robot replace humans for many jobs? Will digitalization decrease vacancies? Will unemployment increase? Will the employment rate decrease?. The aim of this research is to investigate the influence of electronic commerce on employment rate for a sample including the 27 Member States of the European Union (EU-27), over 2010–2019. The European region hosts e-commerce markets that differ significantly since digital abilities, involving internet use, along with acquiring capacity, are aspects affecting implementation and evolution of e-commerce [6] Another purpose of our research is to explore the clusters of nations with reference to electronic commerce adoption and employment rate dynamics. The loss of jobs in many sectors of the economy in all European Union countries caused by the pandemic in the last two years and concerns in populations to keep or find a job, explains better or justifies our objective to identify and study the factors that influence the employment rate of the population directly.
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