Un artículo muy interesante en el que analizan la conexión, en el caso de España, entre las inversiones en automatización y el "offshoring" de la producción. Y el orden de los acontecimientos importa:
When we focus on firms that were importing intensively from lower-income countries before they started to use robots, we find that robot adoption had no effect on the value of imports from lower-income countries but decreased the share of imports sourced from lower-income countries. By contrast, for firms that started using robots before importing intensively from lower-income countries, robot adoption had a positive impact on the probability of them starting to import from lower-income countries and the value of their imports. The effect for the latter group dominates, such that for the full sample the net impact of robot adoption on imports from lower-income countries is positive.
This implies that for firms that were already offshoring, automation displaces tasks from offshore labour. For firms that were not offshoring, automation displaces tasks from home labour. For both, automation reduces production costs; generating a productivity effect and inducing them to expand and demand more labour at home or abroad for non-automatable tasks.
Our results suggest that, for Spanish manufacturing firms, this productivity effect of automation may have outweighed the displacement effect for offshoring. For the subset of firms that were not already offshoring, the productivity effect of automation may have even enabled them to expand and afford the fixed cost of setting up offshoring relationships.
Lo que no aclaran en el resumen es si el offshoring lleva aparejada una reducción del empleo local, o si no son incompatibles.
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