The Global Distribution of Routine and Non-Routine Work

Piotr Lewandowski, Albert Park and Simone Schotte ()
Additional contact information
Simone Schotte: UNU-WIDER

No 13384, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Studies of the effects of technology and globalization on employment and inequality commonly assume that occupations are identical around the world in the job tasks they require. To relax this assumption, we develop a regression-based methodology to predict the country-specific routine task intensity (RTI) of occupations based on survey data collected in 46 low-, middle- and high-income countries. We find that within the same occupation jobs in low- and middle-income countries are more routine intensive than in high-income countries. We attribute these differences mainly to lower technology use in less-developed countries. Using predicted country-specific RTI measures for 87 countries that together employ more than 2.5 billion workers, we find that from 2000 to 2017 the shift away from routine work and towards non-routine work in low- and middle-income countries was much slower than in the high-income countries. The gap in average RTI increased and high-income countries remain the dominant provider of non-routine work. In contrast, assuming that occupations are identical around the world significantly overestimates the role of non-routine tasks in low- and middle-income countries and leads to an implausible conclusion that they have become the dominant supplier of non-routine work.

Keywords: de-routinization; economic development; global division of labour; task content of jobs; skills (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J21 J23 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2020-06
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published - published as 'The global divergence in the de-routinisation of jobs' in: Gradín C., Lewandowski P., Schotte S., Sen K. (eds.), Tasks, Skills, and Institutions - The Changing Nature of Work and Inequality, Oxford University Press, 2023

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Related works:
Working Paper: The Global Distribution of Routine and Non-routine Work (2020)
Working Paper: The global distribution of routine and non-routine work (2020)
Working Paper: The global distribution of routine and non-routine work (2020)
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