China's Robot Revolution May Affect the Global Economy
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China is installing more robots than any other nation, and that may affect every other nation.
Shipments jumped 27 percent to about 90,000 units last year, a single-country record and almost a third of the global total, and will nearly double to 160,000 in 2019, the International Federation of Robotics estimates.
The blazing pace hasn’t dented Chinese wages – yet – but it might influence the global economy.
Automation may drive productivity gains and export competitiveness, but the rising use of robots also threatens to exacerbate domestic income inequality, undermining consumption. And that could spill out beyond the country’s borders, economists said.
“By turbocharging supply and depressing demand, automation risks exacerbating China’s reliance on export-driven growth – threatening hopes for a more balanced domestic and global economy,” BI economists Tom Orlik and Fielding Chen wrote.
Pay gains are intact. Domestic manufacturing workers with a high-school education saw wages rise 53 percent from 2010 to 2014, according to China Household Finance Survey data cited by BI.
“Increasing use of robots should be bad news for medium-skilled workers, especially those in sectors where routine work means scope for automation,” Orlik and Chen said. “Yet wage growth in China remains rapid, and if anything medium-skilled workers conducting routine work are doing better than average.”
Robots are at the core of the government’s sweeping Made in China 2025 plan to upgrade factories to be highly automated and technologically-advanced. Replacing assembly-line workers will also help it to offset a shrinking working-age population.
And while China is catching up to global leaders like South Korea and Singapore, saturation is nowhere in sight and its density of robots is below the world average, according to the IFR.
China also is buying more and more of its own robots. Under Made in China 2025 and a five-year robot plan launched last year, Beijing plans to focus on automating key sectors like car manufacturing, electronics, appliances, logistics, and food.
The government also wants to increase the share of Chinese-branded robots in the country’s $11 billion market to more than 50 percent of total sales volume by 2020 from 31 percent last year, and aims to produce 100,000 robots a year by 2020, compared with 33,000 in 2015. That means competition will intensify for foreign firms that supply 67 percent of China’s robots, such as Japan’s Fanuc Corp. and Yaskawa Electric Corp., according to BI.
中国的机器人革命可能会影响全球经济
根据最新数据显示，中国俨然已经成为机器人安装量增长最迅速的国家了，占全球总量的三分之一。
据国际航运联合会估计，去年中国的机器人出货量猛增了27%，达到9万台，创下了单个国家的出货记录，几乎占到全球总量的第三，预计到2019年这一数字将攀升至16万台，几乎比现在翻一番。
事实上，在国家发布“中国制造2025”规划之后，企业机构在机器人制造与采用方面就愈加凸显。
市场研究机构Bloomberg Intelligence的经济学家汤姆•奥立克（Tom Orlik）和菲尔丁•陈（Fielding Chen）认为，“通过促进供给和抑制需求，自动化加剧了中国依赖于出口驱动型增长的风险，对更加平衡的国内经济和全球经济造成威胁。”
从目前的薪资水平来看，大幅采用机器人还没有直接影响公认的薪资水平，而这种机器人的应用能够缓解人口老龄化的趋势和弊端。另外需要注意的是，尽管中国的机器人增长速度很快，但是我国的人均近期人数量仍远远落后于日、韩、德、美这些国家。