Employment and skills

Overview: Throughout economic history, people were worried that technology may render human work superfluous in the long run.  Thus far, the predictions of a constantly high technological unemployment have never been fulfilled. On the contrary, radical innovation has given rise to the creation of new jobs and industries and further they contributed to an increase in labour productivity and productive capacities, improved living standards and fostered the development of new products. However, as the rate of technological change is set to outpace productivity growth (which usually drives labour demand), the relationship between technological change and the labour market needs to be scrutinized. Therefore, in this task we study to what extent labour demand in Austria has already been affected by digitalization and automatization and experienced a polarization of the labour force.

Objectives:

• Provide a thorough investigation of the labour market with regard to the trends and effects caused by digitalization and automatization
• Identify patterns of potential skills and job mismatches as well as dimensions of inequality related to the Digital Revolution
• Provide a basis for developing proposals for education and vocational policy

As to methods and tools, in this task we rely on descriptive statistical and econometric analysis.