Research On The Impact Of Industrial Robot Trade Network On Labor Productivity

In recent years,the application scale of industrial robots in the industrial field has increased dramatically,and the wide application of intelligent technologies has enabled industrial robots to assist or replace workers in many jobs to complete simple,repetitive,and dangerous tasks,and in some cases industrial robots can even perform some tasks beyond human capabilities,thus effectively increasing productivity.Among the existing studies at home and abroad,most scholars have mainly focused on the impact of industrial robots on labor productivity,and articles with the perspective of trade networks are uncommon.In this paper,we argue that industrial robot trade networks can effectively improve labor productivity.The general idea is divided into two parts.First,we construct the industrial robot trade network based on the analysis method of complex networks,extract the typical factual characteristics of the industrial robot trade network from 2003 to 2019,and separately analyze the structural characteristics of the industrial robot trade network(overall characteristics and individual characteristics),the‘core-edge’ structure(relational,intensity and cross-dimensional),and analyze the evolution of network models using TERGM(temporal exponential random graph model)and STERGM(separable temporal exponential random graph model)to investigate the inner mechanism of the evolution of industrial robot trade network models.First,from the application scale,the‘double center’ of Asia and Europe is changed to the ‘single center of gravity’ mainly in Asia;and from the trade scale,developed countries still have the advantage.Second,the three types of core countries of the law of change specifically,the absolute core countries tend to‘degenerate’ into relational core countries;new absolute core countries are usually ‘evolved’from the strength of the core countries.Third,the trade between countries has a strong reciprocity,but at the same time there is a more obvious hierarchical effect,the interactive trade relationship between the two countries is not equal,and the homogeneous effect is stronger.Fourth,the influence of static variables on the formation of industrial robot trade network relationships is substantially reduced,and dynamic variables have a significant impact on the formation of industrial robot trade networks.Second,the indicators of trade networks can measure a country’s position in the trade network,and the status characteristics have a significant contribution to improving a country’s labor productivity.Therefore,we focus on the influence of industrial robot trade networks on the labor productivity level of the country and the mechanism of action,and on this basis,we explore the heterogeneous effects of different levels of technological complexity and national economic levels.The empirical study finds that: first,industrial robot trade networks show a significant positive influence on the labor productivity level,indicating that the more central a country is in the industrial robot trade network,the more the more central a country is in the industrial robot trade network,the more it contributes to the improvement of labor productivity.Second,the impact of industrial robot trade networks on labor productivity shows heterogeneous effects depending on the country’s economic level and the complexity of industrial robot technology.Third,the paper performs robustness tests by excluding the core country sample and replacing the measures,and controls for possible endogeneity problems by lagging network centrality by one period and using instrumental variables regression,and the conclusions hold.The results of the mechanism analysis show that the improvement of network position in industrial robot trade networks can increase labor productivity through two channels: technology spillover effect and absorption effect.Finally,on this basis,based on the above conclusions and combined with the current development of industrial robot trade in China,this paper puts forward a series of targeted countermeasure suggestions.