Job automation risk, economic structure and trade: a European perspective

Neil Foster-McGregor, Önder Nomaler () and Bart Verspagen
Additional contact information
Önder Nomaler: UNU-MERIT

No 2019-011, MERIT Working Papers from United Nations University - Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT)

Abstract: Recent studies report that technological developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence present a significant risk to jobs in advanced countries. We re-estimate automation risk at the job level, finding sectoral employment structure to be key in determining automation risk at the country level. At the country level, we find a negative relationship between automation risk and labour productivity. We then analyse the role of trade as a factor leading to structural changes and consider the effect of trade on aggregate automation risk by comparing automation risk between a hypothetical autarky and the actual situation. Results indicate that trade increases automation risk in Europe, although moderately so. European countries with high labour productivity see automation risk increase due to trade, with trade between European and non-European nations driving these results. This implies that the high productivity countries do not, on the balance, offshore automation risk, but rather import it.

Keywords: Automation risk for employment; Industry 4.0; Globalisation; Global Value Chains (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F16 F66 J24 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-04-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-big, nep-eec, nep-int, nep-lma and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://unu-merit.nl/publications/wppdf/2019/wp2019-011.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Job Automation Risk, Economic Structure and Trade: a European Perspective (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:unm:unumer:2019011

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MERIT Working Papers from United Nations University - Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ad Notten ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).