Industrial pattern and robot adoption in European regions

Abstract

Recent literature on the diffusion of robots mostly ignores the regional dimension. The contribution of this paper at the debate on Industry 4.0 is twofold. First, IFR (2017) data on acquisitions of industrial robots in the five largest European economies are rescaled at regional levels to draw a first picture of winners and losers in the European race for advanced manufacturing. Second, using an unsupervised machine learning approach to classify regions based on their composition of industries. The paper provides novel evidence of the relationship between industry mix and the regional capability of adopting robots in the industrial processes.