Abstract
This paper finds that greater use of industrial robots relates significantly to a fall in the employment share of routine manual jobs in high-income economies, but not in emerging market and transition economies.
Highlights
Rapid improvements in robot capabilities have fueled concerns about the implications of robot adoption for jobs
We find that robot adoption relates to a decline in the employment share of occupations with a high content of manual routine tasks
We exploit heterogeneity in task intensity across production workers and find that robot adoption relates to declining demand for occupations that are more intensive in routine tasks
Summary
Rapid improvements in robot capabilities have fueled concerns about the implications of robot adoption for jobs. The main contribution of this paper is to empirically study the impact of industrial robots on the occupational structure of the workforce across industries in a set of high-income as well as emerging market and transition economies (EMTEs). The database on occupational employment from Reijnders and de Vries (2018) allows us to examine the share of employment in occupations with a high content of routine tasks—that is, tasks that can be performed by following a well-defined set of procedures. We follow Graetz and Michaels (2018) in constructing measures of robot adoption by country–industry pairs and relate these to changes in occupational employment shares. Our main finding is that country–industry pairs that saw a more rapid increase in robot adoption experienced larger reductions in the employment share of routine manual jobs
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