The Influence of Industrial Robot Application on the Employment of the Manufacturing Industry in China

With the rapid development of manufacturing intelligence, whether the wide application of industrial robots will have an impact on employment has attracted global attention. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development issued a report that the application of robots will have a negative effect on employment in the future. As a developing country, China has become the largest industrial robot market in the world. Whether the economic impact of industrial robot application is different from that of developed countries, and how to effectively cope with the possible employment impact is worth discussing. This paper points out that the application of industrial robots has both creation and substitution effects on employment, and empirically studies the impact of the application of industrial robots on the overall employment level of the manufacturing industry and the difference of the impact on high-skilled and low-skilled jobs from the industry perspective using the data of 13 sub-sectors of manufacturing industry segments from the year 2013 to 2019. The results of this paper show that the creation effect of industrial robot applications on manufacturing employment is greater than the substitution effect. This suggests that the application of industrial robots promotes overall employment demand. Furthermore, the application of industrial robots has a positive impact on the employment demand for high-skilled jobs while simultaneously having a negative impact on the employment demand for low-skilled jobs. The impact on low-skilled personnel is particularly pronounced at this stage. This paper will help to further understand the impact of industrial robot application on employment, and provide suggestions for developing countries to promote the innovation and upgrading of manufacturing industry and actively respond to the impact of the elimination faced by low-skilled workers.