Robots, ICT and aging: How do advanced technologies interact with aging

This paper investigates whether introducing advanced technologies will affect the impact of population aging on productivity. We examine the interactions between age-skill labor groups and technical capital represented by ICT and industrial robots in 12 OECD countries from 2008 to 2020. Using sector-level data, we find that a higher ICT intensity enhances relative labor productivity in industries employing a large share of low-skilled older workers, while robots exhibit complementarities with high-skilled older workers. Moreover, when ICT and robots are jointly adopted, the relative productivity differences across age-skilled groups are shrinked, particularly narrowing the gap between workers of the same age group but with different skill levels. The effects, however, are highly heterogeneous across countries and industries. In countries with high population aging and widespread robot use, the interactions between technological capital and labor differ markedly. Furthermore, robots tend to exhibit stronger complementarities with workers in capital-intensive industries, while ICT shows complementary effects with older workers across both skill groups in labor-intensive industries.