Automation och regional ojämlikhet

Sammanfattning

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the difference between Swedish municipalities susceptibility to automation and its impact on regional inequality during the period 2014-2018. The analysis is conducted in two steps. In the first step, a calculation of each municipality’s average susceptibility to automation is made. This is done by applying estimates of the probability of occupations risk of automation developed by the OECD on each municipality’s respective occupational composition. In the second step, in order to examine the relationship with regional inequality, these calculations are tested on three measures on the municipalities’ average wage growth. The data points on occupations and wages have been collected from Statistics Sweden (SCB). The descriptive results from the first step show that the average municipality in Sweden has a susceptibility to automation of around 46%, where the difference between the municipality with the highest and lowest risk is 7 percentage points. Furthermore, the measures of automation do not have a significant relationship with the total average wage growth. However, it does seem to have a negative relationship with wage growth due to increasing salaries. Also, the change in municipalities susceptibility to automation has a negative relationship with wage growth due to reallocation between occupations with different salaries. The implications from these results suggest that there is some evidence for automation as a determinant of regional inequality measured as wage divergence between municipalities.