Robots at work: a report on automatable and non-automatable employment shares in Europe

This work documents the shares of non-automatable and automatable jobs in 24 European countries over the last three decades. Knowledge of this distribution is important as it reveals the countries, and the demographics within these countries whose employment is the most vulnerable to disappearing because of automation, as well countries who have tended towards substituting labour with automation at a faster rate over the last two decades. The same distribution also reveals the jobs that are likely to stay with us in the future, to the extent that they are non-automatable. This information has an obvious place in any public policy debate. We consider two definitions of automatable work. The first captures jobs that were automatable in the last three decades. This is a great measure of automation retrospectively. The second captures the jobs that are recently automatable (so captures the most recent advances in technology and allows us to consider the shares of jobs that will be automatable over the next ten years). Our analysis gives an overview of differences in the shares of retrospectively and recently automatable jobs across the EC countries included in our analysis.