Technological change and unemployment: evidence from China

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the impact of technological change on unemployment in China’s labour market based on a recent panel data of 283 prefectural-level cities from 2010 to 2017. The results obtained by the system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM-SYS) estimation show that massive adoption of robots is a significant driving force raising unemployment rate while there is a reverse change in the longer period; the insignificant estimates of utility patent and its lagged terms indicate the weak and non-persistent relationship between unemployment and patent-related innovation.

KEYWORDS:

• Technological change
• robot exposure
• utility patents
• China

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• O33
• O31

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

¹ Specific descriptions and summary statistics for variables used in this paper are displayed in the appendix, Table A1.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by National Science Foundation of China [No. 71873048], the Humanities and Social Science Foundation from the China Ministry of Education [No. 18YJA790086], HQU Scientific Research Foundation for Talent Introduction [No. 19SKBS104], and supported by the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation [2020M671929].