Andrea Gentili

Modeling an automation risk index for job profiles provides insights into worker reallocation and informs retraining policy.

This study aims to contribute empirical evidence to the debate about the future of work in an increasingly robotised world. We implement a data-driven approach to study the technological transition in six leading Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. First, we perform a cross-country and cross-sector cluster analysis based on the OECD-STAN database. Second, using the International Federation of Robotics database, we bridge these results with those regarding the sectoral density of robots. We show that the process of robotisation is industry- and country-sensitive. In the future, participants in the political and academic debate may be split into optimists and pessimists regarding the future of human labour; however, the two stances may not be contradictory.

Robots are the most important innovation which has affected the production process in the last three decades. Thanks to the latest advances in technology, they have been able to perform an ever-increasing number of tasks, eventually replacing human work within the whole production process. However, because of the scarcity of suitable data, the extent of this potentially disrupting process is not fully assessed. This paper makes up for the lack of empirical evidence on the effect of robotization on labour dislocation using data collected by the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) on the number of robots installed in the different manufacturing industries of 16 OECD countries over the period 2011–2016. We show that at the industry level a 1% growth in the number of robots reduces the growth rate of worked hours by 0.16, as well as the selling prices and the real values of the compensations of employees. Moreover, we show that a given sector is more likely to be robotized when it is expanding both in terms of relative prices and employee compensations. We conclude that, at least in the selected countries, the introduction of robots plays a key role in slowing down human labour and compensation growth.