Digital inequality in Austria: Empirical evidence from the survey of the OECD "Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies"

Digitisation and rapidly emerging new technologies are transforming many aspects of life such as education, work, and leisure. These changes lead to a growing demand for new skills related to ICT use, computer literacy, internet use, or technical digital skills. However, the extensive literature on digital inequality provides evidence for significant differences in computer skills along the usual dimensions of social inequality. Due to the omnipresence of digital technologies in everyday life, it is all the more important to know the extent of digital inequality to be able to take appropriate measures to ensure that social participation does not degenerate into a question of social stratification in the Digital Age. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence for socio-economic digital inequality in Austria using survey data from the “Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies” (PIAAC) conducted in 2011/2012.1 We show, for Austria, that higher socio-economic background is positively related to digital problem-solving while being female is negatively correlated. However, when controlling for ICT engagement in everyday life, the positive effect of the socio-economic background only remains significant for groups of people with a very high socio-economic background while the effect of gender becomes statistically insignificant. Furthermore, based on Eurostat data we cannot identify a uniform trend towards a decline of digital inequality since 2012. Our results indicate that disadvantaged population groups in Austria should be encouraged and enabled to integrate ICT usage in their everyday life to reduce digital inequality

The nexus between digital skills/competences and work: A bibliometric study

The widespread use of computers and other new information and communication technologies (ICT) in every realm of society has increased the demand for specific skills and competences for people at any age and stage of life to use and work with ICT effectively. Summarised under the terms "digital skills" and "digital competences" by the European Commission in 2018, these concepts still lack clarity and are characterised by some ambiguity though much research has been devoted to them. Given that these two concepts are of high topicality with regard to current labour market developments, like skills mismatch, the digital divide or the design and implementation of occupational retraining programmes, the main purpose of this paper is to contribute to a more clear-cut understanding of the nexus between digital skills/competences and work. To accomplish this goal, we carry out a bibliometric study consisting of both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Our main findings are that research on the nexus between digital skills/competences and work is evolving and this research field is anchored in many different scientific disciplines and shares thematic overlaps with various other areas such as higher education research. The qualitative part of our analysis reveals that this research field is defined by six building blocks with one motor theme on "digital literacy". Furthermore, employment or employability as well as the effects of changing technologies at the workplace are the most crucial topics addressed in this research field, reflecting the high value attributed to digital skills/competences in determining the employability of the current and future workforce

Labour market polarisation revisited: evidence from Austrian vacancy data

Recent research suggests that new technologies are important drivers of empirically observed labour market polari-sation. Many analyses in the field of economics are conducted to evaluate the changing share of employment in low-skill, medium-skill and high-skill occupations over time. This occupation-based approach, however, may neglect the relevance of specific skills and skill bundles, which potentially can be used to explain the observable patterns of labour market polarisation. This paper adds to the literature in two ways: First, we present the results of an analysis of data on job vacancies rather than the currently employed and, second, we derive occupation-defining skills using network analysis tools. The analysis and tool usage allowed us to investigate polarisation patterns in Austrian vacancy data from 2007 to 2017 and identify changes in the skills demanded in job vacancies in Austria. In contrast to most previous research, we find no evidence for polarisation, but rather a trend towards upskilling

Technologischer Wandel und Ungleichheit: Zum Stand der empirischen Forschung

Die Auswirkungen von neuen Technologien auf Beschäftigung und Verteilung werden durch die zunehmende Digitalisierung aller Wirtschaftsbereiche wieder heftig diskutiert. Dieser Artikel unternimmt den Versuch einer kritischen Diskussion des aktuellen Standes der empirischen Forschung. Trotz aller zu findenden methodischen und konzeptionellen Unterschiede lassen sich einige zentrale Befunde herausarbeiten: So zeigt sich etwa, dass Produktivitätszuwächse gesamtwirtschaftlich mittelfristig beschäftigungsneutral zu sein scheinen, die Auswirkungen jedoch kurzfristig deutlich negativ sein können. Zudem unterscheiden sich die Effekte auf Branchenebene. Selbiges gilt für die Innovationsintensität von Unternehmen, wobei insbesondere Produktinnovationen positive Effekte auf die Beschäftigungsentwicklung haben. Weiters verteilen sich diese technologieinduzierten Freisetzungseffekte sehr unterschiedlich auf Berufsgruppen, Tätigkeiten und Qualifizierungsniveaus, was zu einer Polarisierung des Arbeitsmarktes beiträgt. Die unterschiedliche Betroffenheit mit der Berufsgruppen dem technologischen Wandel ausgesetzt sind, ist eine wichtige Determinante der Lohn- und Einkommensverteilung, die in vielen Staaten ebenfalls eine Tendenz zu zunehmender Polarisierung aufweist. Gleichzeitig sind in Bezug auf die Frage nach Verteilungseffekten Aspekte wie Markt- und Machtstrukturen von Bedeutung, sowohl zwischen Unternehmen als auch zwischen Beschäftigten und Arbeitgebern. Die aktuellen Untersuchungen legen daher nahe, dass sich Verteilungsfragen im Zusammenhang mit dem technologischen Wandel neu stellen und neu diskutiert werden müssen, insbesondere in Hinblick auf die Auswirkungen des technischen Fortschritts auf die Einkommensverteilung zwischen Personen mit unterschiedlichen Qualifikationen und zwischen den Faktoren Arbeit und Kapital

Technologischer Fortschritt und Ungleichheit: eine empirische Analyse der Entwicklung in Österreich 2008-2014

In diesem Beitrag werden die wichtigsten empirischen Ergebnisse einer Studie des INEQ-Instituts der WU Wien und von JOANNEUM RESEARCH-POLICIES präsentiert, die sich mit den Auswirkungen des technologischen Wandels auf die Beschäftigung und Einkommensverteilung in Österreich beschäftigt hat. Untersuchungsgegenstand der empirischen Analyse sind die Branchen der Sachgütererzeugung sowie private Dienstleistungen in der Zeit seit dem Ausbruch der Krise (2008 bis 2014). Im Gegensatz zu anderen aktuellen Studien wird hier ein breiterer Ansatz zur Erfassung des technologischen Wandels gewählt, indem sowohl die F&E (Forschungs- und Entwicklungs)-Intensität als auch der Anteil von IKT-Investitionen betrachtet werden. Für den Beobachtungszeitraum zeigt sich, dass höhere F&E-Intensität in der Sachgütererzeugung mit einem Anstieg der Lohnungleichheiten einhergeht, während bei den Dienstleistungen eine Verringerung beobachtet werden kann. Wird hingegen der Anteil der F&E-Beschäftigten an der Gesamtbeschäftigung in den Branchen betrachtet, so ist dieser durchgängig mit einer Reduktion der Lohnungleichheit verbunden. Der Anteil der IKT-Investitionen ist jedoch nur in den Branchen der Sachgütererzeugung und nur in Zusammenhang mit den F&E-Ausgaben signifikant negativ. Diese Ergebnisse verdeutlichen, wie komplex und heterogen die Entwicklungen in den Branchen sind und zeigen zudem auf, dass wegen ihrer Bedeutung in Zukunft bei der Untersuchung der ökonomischen Auswirkungen des technologischen Fortschritts-Verteilungsfragen verstärkt berücksichtigt werden müsse

Technological Change in an Unstable Labor Market: A Dynamic System Approach

The rise of digital technologies, robots and computers has once again drawn attention to questions about the economic impact of technological progress. While process innovation is usually associated with productivity gains and a corresponding displacement of labor, product innovation is assumed to have rather positive effects on employment. We incorporate both channels of technological change by considering their different effects on productivity, needs, and expectations in a stock-flow consistent dynamic system approach. The highly simplified economic system presented in this article is based on standard assumptions, while with regard to technological progress and its effects the model allows for the emergence of off-equilibria paths and an unstable labor market. The chosen framework illustrates key dependencies in market economies, but simultaneously ties in with a fundamental level and thereby leaves space for shortcomings. Both may be seen as contribution to further developments as science, just like technological change, partly always will be a process of trial and error

Digitalisation of occupations-Developing an indicator based on digital skill requirements.

Digitalisation is assumed to have far reaching consequences for workers. So far, these have been analysed using indicators derived from survey data on occupational tasks. Survey-based indicators measure what people do at work but provide little insight into the skills required to perform a task. Since multiple skills may be necessary to perform a task, approximating digital skills through tasks may underestimate the extent of digitalisation of a given occupation. Besides, they provide limited coverage in terms of periodicity, scope and variety of tasks. We therefore suggest to change the perspective from tasks to skills and propose to analyse the digital skill requirements of occupations. To this end, we use detailed information on the classification of European Occupations, Skills and Qualifications, natural language processing tools and network analysis methods to determine digital skills in the database. We construct four different versions of the digital competencies indicator identifying occupations that depend highly on digital skills. Our indicator can be mapped to the ISCO-08 classification and easily be used alongside other data sources. We show that compared to an indicator based on ICT-tasks derived from the OECD 'Programme for the Assessment of Adult Skills', our indicator captures more complex and specialised digitalised occupations. Our results stress the importance of using granular data in order to properly identify digital skill requirements of jobs

Text analysis: Most frequent terms and RCA of terms.

Note 1: term counts based on the label, alternative labels and the description of skills. Note 2: a RCA < 1 means that the term is less frequent among digital skills relative to all skills. Thus the term has a relative comparative ‘disadvantage’ describing digital skills. RCA (low advantage) for digital RCA between 1 and 5; RCA (mid advantage) for digital RCA between 5 and 10; and RCA (high advantage) for digital RCA greater than 10. Note 3: for the text analysis, we first tokenise the text, we then discard punctuation marks and stop-words such as ‘from’, ‘the’, and ‘further’, and finally, we apply a lemmatisation using Python NLTK package for Natural Language Processing (NLP).</p