The Risk of Automation for Jobs in OECD Countries

Melanie Arntz, Terry Gregory, Ulrich Zierahn · OECD social employment and migration working papers · 14 May 2016

Where this sits in the debate

Will AI destroy more jobs than it creates?

Direction of the finding as read from the abstract by an AI model (AI-written).

Key takeaway AI-written

Using a task-based approach that accounts for differences in tasks within occupations, the authors estimate that on average 9% of jobs across 21 OECD countries are automatable, far fewer than occupation-based estimates suggest. The share ranges from 6% in Korea to 12% in Austria.

The paper in three steps AI-written

Written by an AI agent from the paper's abstract, which is the primary source and is quoted below.

The question

How many jobs in OECD countries are actually at risk of automation once the mix of tasks within each occupation is taken into account?

The approach

The authors estimate automatability for 21 OECD countries using a task-based approach that allows for differences in tasks among workers in the same occupation, in contrast to the occupation-based method of Frey and Osborne.

The findings

On average across the 21 countries, 9% of jobs are automatable, far fewer than occupation-based estimates suggest. The share ranges from 6% in Korea to 12% in Austria.

How to read it: observational. Analysis of real-world firm, worker, or market data — realistic settings; causal claims depend on the identification strategy.

Limitations and counterpoints AI-written

The estimate measures technical automatability, not actual job losses, and predates generative AI; differences between countries may reflect workplace organisation, past automation investment and education.

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a revival of concerns that automation and digitalisation might after all result in a jobless future. The debate has been fuelled by studies for the US and Europe arguing that a substantial share of jobs is at “risk of computerisation”. These studies follow an occupation-based approach proposed by Frey and Osborne (2013), i.e. they assume that whole occupations rather than single job-tasks are automated by technology. As we argue, this might lead to an overestimation of job automatibility, as occupations labelled as high-risk occupations often still contain a substantial share of tasks that are hard to automate. Our paper serves two purposes. Firstly, we estimate the job automatibility of jobs for 21 OECD countries based on a task-based approach. In contrast to other studies, we take into account the heterogeneity of workers’ tasks within occupations. Overall, we find that, on average across the 21 OECD countries, 9 % of jobs are automatable. The threat from technological advances thus seems much less pronounced compared to the occupation-based approach. We further find heterogeneities across OECD countries. For instance, while the share of automatable jobs is 6 % in Korea, the corresponding share is 12 % in Austria. Differences between countries may reflect general differences in workplace organisation, differences in previous investments into automation technologies as well as differences in the education of workers across countries.

About this publication

Working paper. A working paper — circulated for discussion before formal peer review, the standard first outlet in economics.

Published: 2016 (127 months ago)
Citations: 879 (OpenAlex)

879 citations recorded by OpenAlex — too few 2016 papers in this collection for a fair comparison.