Economy 4.0: Employment effects by occupation, industry, and gender

The aim of this study is to investigate how the diffusion of the new digital technologies (Economy 4.0-technologies) effects the magnitude and composition of employment in Austria. For this purpose, an input-output framework is adopted taking into account direct as well as indirect effects of the new technologies by industry, occupation and gender. These employment effects are estimated as the difference between a base economy (as represented by the most recent Austrian input-output table) and the same economy after an assumed 10-year transformation period with the introduction of new production technologies and devel-opment of new products for final demand. Based on substitution potentials estimated on de-tailed occupational level available from previous research, we model the changes in labour productivity. Combining two different scenarios of labour productivity change with two dif-ferent assumptions about collective wage bargaining outcomes gives us four possible scenari¬os of macroeconomic paths of Economy 4.0. The results show that due to Economy 4.0 dur¬ing the next 10 years job displacement will probably be greater than job creation and aggre¬gate employment will decline by 0.80% to 4.81% relative to total present employment. Fur-thermore, the results indicate that occupations gaining in employment are highly skilled while the occupations losing in employment are medium-skilled. Hereby, the female workers are adversely affected in terms of employment and labour income.