Links between innovation, sourcing and productivity

Purpose and goal

The aim of the project was to increase knowledge of how the national economies and employment in Finland and Sweden are influenced by innovation, global value chains, offshoring and automatisation (robotisation). The project has used both national statistics and international indexes to study this issue and delivered robust results based on a large amount of data and a long period of time.

Expected results and effects

The overall result of the project is that global value chains through offshoring have a positive impact on both productivity and employment. The particularity with our analysis is that more than half of the data consists of companies with 10-25 employees, and our study is among the first to show that even small businesses can benefit from being part of global value chains.

Planned approach and implementation

Initially, the project consisted of collecting or organizing a very extensive data material. We have then translated two international indexes (Frey-Osborne 2013 and Blinder 2019) to each occupational classification and every company in Sweden. We have then calculated the index for each company in terms of share of the job threatened by offshoring or automation. Finally, we included these statistics in our regression analysis, where we estimated the importance of offshoring, offshorability and automation for enterprise productivity and employment.