Technology and the Task Content of Jobs across the Development Spectrum

The tasks workers perform on the job are informative about the direction and the impact of technological change. We harmonize occupational task content measures between two worker-level surveys, which separately cover developing and developed countries. Developing countries use routine-cognitive tasks and routine-manual tasks more intensively than developed countries, but less intensively use non-routine analytical tasks and non-routine interpersonal tasks. This is partly because developing countries have more workers in occupations with high routine contents and fewer workers in occupations with high non-routine contents. More important, a given occupation has more routine contents and less non-routine contents in developing countries than in developed countries. Since 2006, occupations with high non-routine contents gained employment relative to those with high routine contents in most countries, regardless of their income level or initial task intensity, indicating the global reaches of the technological change that reduces the demand for occupations with high routine contents.