What have industrial robots done for growth and employment? IZA affiliate Georg Graetz and Guy Michaels answer this question using novel data on industrial robots in 14 different industries in 17 developed countries including Germany, Australia, South Korea, and the US, over the period 1993-2007.
Their findings: Robots account for one-sixth of productivity growth on average across countries. They also account for more than a tenth of total GDP growth. And while robots do not seem to reduce overall employment, there is some evidence that they reduce the employment of low-skilled and, to a lesser extent, middle-skilled workers.
By Georg Graetz and Guy Michaels
Robots’ capacity for autonomous movement and their ability to perform an expanding set of tasks have captured writers’ imaginations for almost a century. But more recently, robots have emerged from the pages of science fiction novels into the real world, and discussions of their possible economic effects have become ubiquitous (see e.g. The Economist 2014, Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014). However, there has so far been no systematic empirical analysis of the effects that robots are already having.
We compile a new dataset spanning 14 industries (mainly manufacturing industries, but also agriculture and utilities) in 17 developed countries (including European countries, Australia, South Korea, and the US). Uniquely, our dataset includes a measure of the use of industrial robots employed in each industry, in each of these countries, and how it has changed from 1993-2007. Our data on these robots come from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR). We obtain information on other economic performance indicators from the EUKLEMS database. [Read more…] about Robots at work: Boosting productivity without killing jobs?