Technology and the Task Content of Jobs across the Development Spectrum

Julieta Caunedo, Elisa Keller and Yongseok Shin

No 28681, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Technology is the driver of labor allocation across sectors and occupations. Is the impact of technological change on developing countries similar to its impact on developed countries? Will developing countries follow the same development path that developed economies have taken? Our approach focuses on how technology shifts and reshapes the tasks workers perform on the job, and views occupations as the natural observable stand-in for these tasks. We first take stock of our knowledge on how technological change reallocates labor. We then construct a new measure of occupational task contents for each country and present new evidence on countries' task intensity. In the cross section, developed countries use non-routine analytical and interpersonal tasks more intensively than developing countries, but less intensively use routine-cognitive and routine-manual tasks. Both the occupational employment share and the occupational task contents of a country matter for these relationships. In the time dimension, countries with high initial task intensities experienced a decline in these intensities, suggesting convergence in task intensities across countries. Our results show that occupational task contents ought to be measured for each country for proper analysis. More broadly, we should not simply extrapolate what we know about the impact of technology on the labor market in developed countries to developing countries.

JEL-codes: J16 J24 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma and nep-tid
Note: DEV EFG
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published as Julieta Caunedo & Elisa Keller & Yongseok Shin, 2023. "Technology and the Task Content of Jobs across the Development Spectrum," The World Bank Economic Review, vol 37(3), pages 479-493.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w28681.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Technology and the Task Content of Jobs across the Development Spectrum (2023)
Working Paper: Technology and the Task Content of Jobs across the Development Spectrum (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:28681

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w28681

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().