In this paper, we study whether and to what extent exposure to industrial robots leads to the regionalization of global value chains (GVC) for a group of seven European countries and ten manufacturing sectors. We use country-industry-year data on GVC participation for the period 1995-2018 from the OECD-ICIO database and we merge it with industrial robot data from the IFR. To assess the non-spurious long-run relationship between robots and GVC dynamics, we adopt a panel cointegration approach and dynamic OLS regressions, while we assess the direction of causality using a panel vector error correction approach. Our results suggest that, on average, higher exposure to robotization Granger causes a higher GVC regionalization, which is more pronounced when the source of foreign value-added moves from Asian economies to Eastern Europe. We also find that sectoral heterogeneity matters, since a stronger robot-induced regionalization of GVCs tends to occur in more upstream sectors and with high labour-to-capital ratios.
Robots and the regionalization of global value chains
Burlina, Chiara;
2025-01-01
Abstract
In this paper, we study whether and to what extent exposure to industrial robots leads to the regionalization of global value chains (GVC) for a group of seven European countries and ten manufacturing sectors. We use country-industry-year data on GVC participation for the period 1995-2018 from the OECD-ICIO database and we merge it with industrial robot data from the IFR. To assess the non-spurious long-run relationship between robots and GVC dynamics, we adopt a panel cointegration approach and dynamic OLS regressions, while we assess the direction of causality using a panel vector error correction approach. Our results suggest that, on average, higher exposure to robotization Granger causes a higher GVC regionalization, which is more pronounced when the source of foreign value-added moves from Asian economies to Eastern Europe. We also find that sectoral heterogeneity matters, since a stronger robot-induced regionalization of GVCs tends to occur in more upstream sectors and with high labour-to-capital ratios.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
