Page - (000070) - in Disrupted Development and the Future of Inequality in the Age of Automation

5 AUTOMATION AND STRUCTURAL TRANSFORMATION … 63 Table 5.2 Estimates of the employment impact of automation Authors Region Findings Studies of OECD countries Frey and Osborne (2013) US “47 percent of total US employment is at risk” (ibid., p. 1) Barany and Siegel (2014) US ICTs substitute middle-skill occupations Acemoglu and Restrepo (2015) n/a “Automation, by reducing wages relative to the rental rate of capital, encourages the creation of new labor-intensive tasks” (ibid., p. 41) Arntz et al. (2016) OECD 9% of jobs automatable but “jobs at risk” may not translate into employment loss; large negative job effects “unlikely” Bessen (2016) US During 1984–2007 computer use was asso- ciated with a 3% average annual job loss in manufacturing but a 1% increase elsewhere Executive Office of the President of the United States (2016) US “Economy has repeatedly proven itself capable of handling this scale of change,” but jobs at risk “concentrated among lower-paid, lower skilled, and less-educated workers” (ibid., p. 2) Acemoglu and Restrepo (2017) US “One additional robot per thousand work- ers (…) reduces aggregate employment to population ratio by 0.34 percentage points and aggregate wages by 0.5 percent” (ibid., p. 36) Atkinson and Wu (2017) US Labor market disruption occurring at its lowest rate since the Civil War IMF (2017) Advanced economies Technological progress “explains about half the overall decline [of the labor income share] in advanced economies, with a larger negative impact on the earnings of mid- dle-skilled workers” Mishel and Bivens (2017) US No evidence that automation leads to job- lessness or inequality PWC (2017) OECD Automation could replace 38% jobs in the United States, 35% in Germany, 30% in the UK, and 21% in Japan by early 2030s Studies of developing countries Chandy (2017) Developing countries “Automation is likely to replace jobs even faster in developing countries than in indus- trial ones” (ibid., p. 15) (continued)