Research On The Effects Of Industrial Robots Application On Employment

Artificial intelligence technology is widely considered as the general technology of the fourth generation of industrial revolution.As a representative product of artificial intelligence,robot will completely change the past mode of social production and have a huge impact on economic development and social structure.In recent years,the research on AI has gradually risen in academic circles,but most of the research is aimed at western developed countries,and there are few empirical studies from developing countries,and the impact mechanism and the impact on different employment structures have not been in-depth studied.Firstly,this paper constructs a production task model to analyze the change process of labor employment in the process of automation.Then use the panel data of37 industries in China from 2006 to 2019 to empirically analyze the impact of changes in industrial robot application on the scale of labor employment.For the endogenous problems that may exist in the regression results,the lag period of robot use data in the same industry in the United States and China’s robot data is used as the tool variable to test,and the robustness of the benchmark regression results is tested.Further,the impact mechanism is verified,and the heterogeneity of the industry is analyzed according to different characteristics to test whether the relationship between the robot application and employment is affected by "Industry 4.0".According to the estimated results,the conclusions are as follows:(1)In terms of employment scale,the increase in the application of robots in China’s industrial industry will significantly reduce the scale of labor employment.For every 1%increase in the application scale of industrial robots,the overall employment opportunities of workers will decrease by 0.0500%.The results are still reliable after endogenous analysis and robustness test.(2)The impact of robot application on the employment structure includes: the employment of low-skilled workers shows a substitution effect,but increases the employment opportunities of high-skilled workers;The impact on male workers is not significant,and it shows strong substitution for female workers;For enterprises,the employment of small and micro enterprises decreases more than that of large and medium-sized enterprises;The number of employment of foreign-funded enterprises has decreased the most seriously,and the employment of private enterprises has not changed significantly.(3)In the part of mechanism analysis,this paper verifies the substitution effect of robots on employment and labor productivity.For China’s current industrial industry,the substitution effect is greater than the offset effect of productivity effect.(4)The heterogeneity analysis shows that the substitution effect is the main factor for all types of industrial industries,but the substitution effect is relatively weak in industrial industries with low monopoly degree,high capital intensity,high robot density and high technology level.(5)After the introduction of the concept of "Industry 4.0" in Germany in 2011,the impact on the labor market was significantly weaker than before.