Automation and taxation:An empirical assessment in Europe

DOI

Decomposing taxes by source (labor, capital, sales), we analyze the impact of automation (1) on tax revenues, (2) the structure of taxation, and (3) identify channels of impact in 19 EU countries during 1995-2016. Robots and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are different technologies designed to automate manual (robots) or cognitive tasks (ICT).

Until 2007, robot diffusion was associated with decreasing factor and tax income, and a shift from taxes on capital to goods. ICTs coincided with changes in the structure of taxation from capital to labor. We find decreasing employment, but increasing wages and labor income. After 2008, we do not find an effect for robots  but observe an ICT-induced increase in capital income, a rise of services, but no effect on taxation. 
Automation goes through different phases with different economic impacts which affect the amount and structure of taxes. 
Whether automation is negatively related to taxation depends (a) on the technology type, (b) the stage of diffusion and (c) local conditions.

This dataset contains the effects from robots (R) and IT (IT) on taxes (lnT) and labor (lnL) using firm-level data (Orbis Europe) for the period 2007-2016 in regional regressions at the NUTS0, NUTS2 and NUTS3 level.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.34894/D25FN9
Metadata Access https://dataverse.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.34894/D25FN9
Provenance
Creator Pantelis, Koutroumpis ORCID logo
Publisher DataverseNL
Contributor Stapleton, Greg
Publication Year 2021
Rights CC0 Waiver; info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess; https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
OpenAccess true
Contact Stapleton, Greg (Maastricht University)
Representation
Resource Type Technology measures (ICT and Robot intensities), Economic variables (at various regional levels); Dataset
Format text/csv
Size 2813; 32657; 157853
Version 1.0
Discipline Business and Management; Economics; Social and Behavioural Sciences
Spatial Coverage Oxford University