Automation and economic growth: the contribution of industrial robots to labor productivity in China

Amid a diminishing demographic dividend and declining returns on traditional capital, automation has become an increasingly prominent feature of China's economic growth. This study integrates domestic production and customs import data to estimate provincial robot capital stocks from 2006 to 2023, and quantifies their contribution to labor productivity within a growth accounting framework. Results show that robot capital deepening contributes an average relative rate of 13.37 percent to labor productivity growth, and in some provinces its contribution even surpasses that of traditional capital. This positive contribution remains robust across a series of additional checks, including alternative depreciation rates, sample period adjustments, changes in base-year settings, and different allocation methods for domestically produced robots. Notably, excluding domestic production would understate the estimated contribution, while the choice of allocation method affects its magnitude. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that robot productivity contributions vary with regional factor endowments, innovation capacity, industrial structure, and institutional environments. Over time, these contributions have strengthened, yet regional divergence has widened, suggesting growing inequality in robot-based growth transitions. These findings suggest that differentiated regional policies are urgently needed to address the widening automation divide.