BERLIN, April 4 (Xinhua) -- The process of digitalization has created more new jobs in Germany than it has eliminated, a study by the Mannheim-based Center for European Economic Research (ZEW) showed on Wednesday.
ZEW was commissioned by the German Ministry for Education and Research to examine the impact of the growing use of digital technologies in economic activity on the domestic labor market.
According to the conclusive study, fearful predictions of an end of human employment due to the rise of intelligent machines were not borne out by empirical data.
Whereas a loss of 5 percent in employment levels was identified between 2011 and 2016 due to digitalization, this decline in jobs was more than compensated by the positive labor market effects of the use of related new technologies. "Overall, digitalization between 2011 and 2016 has even contributed to growth in the number of jobs by 1 percent," a statement by study author Terry Gregory read.
The findings were based on surveys among 2,000 leading managers in German firms with more than 300,000 combined employees who were questioned over their use of robots and networked, autonomous machines, as well as investments they intended to make within the next five years. The survey results were then combined with data from the Federal Labor Agency on the number of workers in socially-ensured employment, wage levels and the qualification of staff.
Notably, the resulting study directly contradicts an earlier assessment by the German Information Technology Association (Bitkom) which forecast that 3 million jobs would be eliminated by digitalization by 2022 in Germany alone.
The ZEW researchers expressed hope that their new findings would "significantly enhance understanding of actual change in the division of labor between humans and machines."
Even if the aggregate impact of technological change on the German labor market was relatively limited, the qualitative nature of work would change significantly according to the study.
On the one hand, repetitive manual tasks can increasingly be carried out more efficiently and cheaply by machines, reducing employer's incentives to hire humans for such tasks. On the other hand, "highly-paid, analytical and interactive jobs", where humans were still irreplaceable, would become more important.