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ITIF: The Case Against Taxing Robots
8 April 2019
Robots are already driving productivity. Investment in robots contributed to 10 percent of GDP growth per capita in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries from 1993 to 2016.5 There is also a 0.42 percent correlation between a country's wage-adjusted manufacturing robot adoption and growth in productivity between 2010 and 2017.6 Graetz and Michaels found that robot densification increased annual growth of GDP and labor productivity between 1993 and 2007 by about 0.37 and 0.36 percentage points respectively across 17 countries studied, representing 10 percent of total GDP growth - this compared with the 0.35 percentage point estimated total contribution of steam technology to British annual labor productivity growth between 1850 and 1910.