Martijn Smit (p)

Calvin Jones

The traditional approach to new economic activities in a region is that of inmigrating firms. Such firms base their deployment on a number of factors, including market access and the availability of resources; they often add to the existing sectors in a region. The young field of evolutionary economic geography focuses instead on new sectors branching out from existing sectors. Such intersectoral mobility is likely to increase given technological progress. Still, these new sectors can only start and grow by using existing capabilities in a region, getting employees from other sectors or other regions. Employees and their knowledge are crucial in enabling or at least permitting the birth of new sectors in a region. We focus on the sources for employees in new sectors (i.e., not previously present in a region). Where do these employees come from – which sector, and which region? We use data on all employees and firms in the Netherlands over a period of several years to visualise the birth of new sectors in labour market areas, and we then analyse the probability an employee will be part of such a birth, depending on their characteristics.

Calvin Jones (p)

Stepan Zemtsov

There has been extensive and detailed discussion of the impact of digital technologies on productive and distribution systems, and especially the role of humans within them. Analysis has focussed on which tasks, occupations and industries might be most or most quickly affected, and what ameliorative actions might be taken to reduce or mitigate negative impacts. There has, however, been far less attention on the spatial implications of technological incursion, with such analysis so far only drawing on patterns of industrial distribution or extant automation to draw conclusions. We consider more widely the role of cities in an automating world and suggest that the impact of technology on production and consumption will combine with ownership patterns in technology sectors and the existing distribution of globalised production to significantly reduce the ability of cities in most places, and hence of most countries, to generate economic value. In particular the reduction in labour returns relative to capital, the concentrated ownership of critical technological intellectual property and mediating platforms, together with the concentration of many cities on tech-vulnerable activities are important issues. The ultimate 'resting place' of value added will be critical at a time when governments at various scales will be called upon to intervene to help people respond to the socio-economic impacts of artificial intelligence and automation

Stepan Zemtsov (p)

Uwe Blien

The use of unmanned technologies (robots as autonomous systems) can cause a decrease in employment rate and inequality growth. For large territorially heterogeneous countries (Russia, the United States, China, Brazil, etc.), the social consequences of technological changes will have a pronounced geographic (regional and urban) specificity, leading to large-scale migrations and changes in the socio-economic space.
Based on the internationally comparable methods (Frey and Osborne 2013; Manyika et al. 2017), it was estimated that about 44% of the workers in Russia can be replaced by robots (automated), which is lower than in most countries. Automation does not directly lead to an increase in unemployment. But long-term mismatch between the exponential increase in automation rate and the compensating effects of retraining and new jobs creation is possible. Some people will be not ready for life-long learning, development and creation of new ideas, technologies and products, competition with robots, and accordingly there is a possibility of their social exclusion in the future. The term "nescience economy" and the corresponding evaluation methodology were proposed to describe these processes.
We estimated that about 50% of labour forces in Russia can be excluded from modern economic activities. The sources of income of these citizens are unclear, but unconditional income introduction is increasingly being discussed. In some regions the share of potentially excluded working citizens in the population is more than 55%: Ingushetia, Chechnya, Nenets autonomous region.
On the basis of the proposed econometric model, a number of measures are described to reduce the threats, which includes the introduction of continuous learning systems, the formation of a network of entrepreneurial universities, reducing investment risks, involving the population in entrepreneurship and improving the quality of the information and communication infrastructure.

Uwe Blien (p), Oliver Ludewig , Anja Rossen

Martijn Smit

The effects of technological change on employment have received much attention in recent years. Will productivity gains lead to technological unemployment or to new prosperity? In our paper, we formally show that under general assumptions the price elasticity of demand on product markets is decisive: Technological change leads to an expansion of employment if product demand is elastic. It is accompanied, however, by shrinkage of employment if product demand is inelastic. A transition from the elastic into the inelastic range of the demand function for the most important product(s) can already suffice to plunge a region into crisis.
In our empirical analysis we use industry level time series data on output, prices, employment and national income for Germany to estimate Marshallian type demand functions. We use an instrumental variables estimator to derive the price elasticities for different industries. Another approach applies state space modelling to derive time-varying elasticities. In a second step, we use the information on the elasticities to analyse the regional labour market performance of the respective industries and regions.