The Economic Impact of Factory Automation

Abstract

Among the reasons for studying the technological system for factory automation were the strong position of Sweden in all of the technologies which make up factory automation and the pervasive nature of these technologies in terms of their diffusion among a broad set of industries. But while it is often assumed that there is a strongly positive impact of automation on economic performance, there is little conclusive empirical evidence. A recent search of articles on automation yielded the result that there was only a handful of articles on the subject in economics journals during the period 1985–91 (—the few that were found dealt mostly with diffusion and labor issues), while there have been numerous articles published in business, management, and engineering journals. The majority of these articles deal with the problem of quantifying the benefits of, and therefore justifying investment in, automation technology at the level of the firm.

A previous version of this chapter was published in Ove Granstrand (ed.), Economics of Technology (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1994).