Robot adoption and green productivity: Curse or Boon

Abstract

Recent studies demonstrated that robotics has improved efficiency in several fields, but they seem to ignore the fact that replacing human labor with robots may lead to extra energy consumption, which will raise concerns about more serious environmental problems. In this paper, we use a combined data set to explore the relationship between robot adoption and green productivity. The result shows that the adoption of robots in production does lead to new pollution sources, but there is no direct evidence that the rebound effects will threaten green productivity, and the existence of scale compensation is instead conducive to a transformation towards cleaner production modes. More importantly, using robots to replace human labor means improvements in energy efficiency and positive market selection effects, all of which can help to boost green productivity. Therefore, robot adoption is a boon for green productivity rather than a curse, and they have been proved to be beneficial even in regions dominated by high pollution industries despite green productivity gains inequality. Our findings provide new evidence for the green-biased character of robotics and new thoughts for understanding the environmental outcomes of robot adoption.