Robots, Tasks and Trade
By E. Artuç, Paulo Bastos, Bob Rijkers. Journal of International Economics, 2018
121 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper examines the effects of robotization on trade patterns, wages and welfare. It develops a Ricardian model with two-stage production and trade in intermediate and final goods in which robots can take over some tasks previously performed by humans in a subset of industries. An increase in robot adoption in the North reduces the cost of production and thereby impacts trade in final and intermediate goods with the South. The empirical analysis uses ordinary least squares and instrumental variable regressions exploiting variation in exposure to robots across countries and sectors. Both reveal that greater robot intensity in own production leads to: (i) a rise in imports sourced from less developed countries in the same industry; and (ii) an even stronger increase in exports to those countries. Counterfactual simulations indicate that Northern robotization raises domestic welfare, but initially depresses wages. However, this adverse effect is likely to be reversed by further reductions in robot prices. Northern robotization may lead to higher wages and welfare in the South.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f66028bba69d1bd5ab0944129484f3325ef04a38
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Citations in the corpus
- Who on Earth Can Work from Home? (2020, background): “Autor, Levy, and Murnane (2003)—ALM2003 from now on—argue that computers substitute for workers “carrying out a limited and well-defined set of cognitive and manual activities that can be accomplished by following explicit rules.”
- De-Globalisation? Global Value Chains in the Post-COVID-19 Age (2020, unknown): “Artuc et al. (2018) and the World Development Report (2020, Chapter 6) present industry-level evidence suggesting that automation in industrial countries appears to have, in fact, boosted imports from developing countries. In more recent work, Stapleton and Webb (2020) have confirmed these findings ”
- Conceptual Aspects of Global Value Chains (2019, unknown): “Building on recent work by Artuc et al. (2018), the World Development Report (2020, Chapter 6) presents preliminary evidence suggesting that automation in industrial countries appears to have, in fact, boosted imports from developing countries, although the effect is heterogeneous across sectors and”