Industrial Robots, Economic Growth, and Sustainable Development in an Aging Society

Abstract

The impact of industrial robots and aging on economic growth is analyzed using both theoretical and empirical models in this paper. An aging mechanism is integrated into the task model and Solow model, which integrates the existing relationship between industrial robots and economic growth. Our data come from the International Robot Federation, Penn World Table, and the World Bank, and we obtain robot usage data and macroeconomic data for 77 countries and regions between 1993 and 2019. We found that industrial robots can stimulate economic growth, but aging does not affect it. It is worth noting that aging has more adverse effects on economies using industrial robots than economies without industrial robots. Further, according to mechanism analysis, the main channel of economic growth is industrial robots replacing labor, followed by improving total factor productivity (TFP), a measure of technological change in an economy. Given endogenous problems, the results are still stable.