ALBERT

Description: Industry 4.0 is fundamentally changing industrial employment around the globe. Yet, the burgeoning scientific and societal discourses both highlight the need for more empirical evidence of how Industry 4.0 affects industrial employment by taking into consideration varying circumstances and preconditions. Given the heterogeneity of industrial development and technology proliferation between countries, it is crucial to understand and compare future outlooks of industrial practitioners from different regions. This study analyses how Industry 4.0 will affect industrial employment comparing practitioners’ perceptions from Brazil, China, and Germany. Moreover, in our analysis we provide insights for different industrial sectors and company sizes. The study provides evidence that the effects of Industry 4.0 on staffing requirements differ between domains. Domains generally associated with larger shares of relatively low-skilled labour are expected to experience declines in staffing requirements, suggesting an increase in the polarisation between high- and low-skilled labour in terms of job opportunities. This effect is observable especially in larger companies. Moreover, an increase in the required employee qualifications is expected in all domains. Unlike in the other two countries, the inter-sectoral variability of perceptions is very small in China. There the company size seems to have the reverse effect on required qualifications compared to Brazilian and German companies, where less respondents expect higher qualifications for SMEs. Although we find sectoral differences both within and between countries, there is no clearly discernible trend allowing for generalizable sectoral conclusions, highlighting that impacts of Industry 4.0 on qualification should be further investigated under consideration of underlying contextual factors.

Description: Achieving transparency of the social and environmental impacts of industrial production poses significant obstacles for companies operating in complex global supply chains. They often do not possess sufficient information of other actors, especially at lower tiers in the supply chain. In recent years, data collection and information exchange in industry has been increasingly assisted by digital technologies, coining the term Industry 4.0. However, it remains largely unknown how companies try to foster transparency in their supply chains and how digital technologies are utilized for this purpose. In this study, we employ a qualitative, interview-based approach from both buyers’ and suppliers’ perspectives to investigate practices of supplier sustainability assessments in the electronics industry as well as their current and envisioned utilization of digital technologies. With regard to the exchange of sustainability-related information, we find that buying firms do not consistently check for the availability of digital interfaces to suppliers. Systematic and well-structured collection of such data is rare in suppliers, relying on manual self-assessments and lacking the means of automated data collection. This poses difficulties for buying firms to ensure validity of sustainability performance claims, highlighted by the fact that not all buying firms analyze suppliers’ self-assessments. To overcome such issues, ongoing industry-wide efforts of standardizing sustainability requirements should be extended to include strategic considerations of streamlining technology implementation to enhance data availability and validity.

Description: Ein erheblicher Teil der globalen Treibhausgasemissionen wird durch die Industrie verursacht. Ihre Digitalisierung wird oft als Weg zu mehr Nachhaltigkeit gesehen. Zugleich zeichnen sich ökologische und soziale Risiken ab, deren Erforschung noch am Anfang steht. Bisherige Erkenntnisse zeigen multiple Herausforderungen auf. Soll eine nachhaltige Industrie 4.0 gelingen, müssen diese bereits konzeptionell einbezogen werden. Aufbauend auf einer konzeptionell-theoretischen Literaturanalyse präsentiert der folgende Beitrag aktuelle Entwicklungen aus Forschung, Wirtschaft und Politik. Wir beleuchten ausgewählte Ansätze, die auf eine nachhaltige Industrie 4.0 abzielen und skizzieren abschließend praktische Gestaltungsoptionen.

Description: This factsheet provides a concise and fact-based overview of various aspects of the digital transformation of African economies and is intended as a basic introduc-tion to this topic.

Description: Die Digitalisierung schafft neue Produktions- und Konsummuster und verändert nahezu jeden Bereich der Wirtschaft. Dabei ist der zunehmende Einsatz von Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologie (IKT) mit der Hoffnung auf ökonomische Entwicklungschancen und umweltfreundlichere Produktion verbunden. Die sozialen und ökologischen Auswirkungen des digitalen Wandels in der Wirtschaft sind derweil erst in Ansätzen verstanden. Vor allem zu den Umwelteffekten ist wissenschaftlich belastbares Datenmaterial rar. Erste Trends lassen sich jedoch bereits ablesen. Ob es gelingt, den digitalen Wandel der Wirtschaft mit den Zielen einer nachhaltigen Entwicklung in Einklang zu bringen, ist ungewiss und hängt entscheidend von der Gestaltung der digitalen Transformation auf nationaler und internationaler Ebene ab.

Description: With the proclaimed advent of Industry 4.0 in supply chains, digitalisation is expected to restructure the ways in which buying firms and suppliers in supply chains collaborate, including on sustainability issues. Digital technologies are expected to foster information exchange and facilitate collaboration on sustainability issues between firms. Yet, there is limited empirical evidence explaining the role of Industry 4.0 in the context of sustainable supply chain management. This qualitative, exploratory study examines digitalisation in the electronics supply chain and its implications for sustainable supply chain collaboration (SCC). We focus on environmental sustainability aspects, such as environmental data analysis and energy use in the supply chain. We conducted 18 interviews with representatives from international electronics buying firms and Chinese suppliers to explore a) how digital technologies are currently used in SCC, and b) which opportunities, risks, and obstacles are associated with digitalisation in sustainable SCC. Our results indicate that a broad range of digital technologies on different digital maturity levels (including Industry 4.0 technologies) are used in SCC, but their use for sustainability purposes is still underdeveloped. Digitalisation is expected by most firms to improve sustainability, e.g., using big data analytics for energy management or easing the transfer of sustainability knowledge in the chain (what we call "digital environmental upgrading"). We argue, however, that if firms do not prioritise addressing sustainability through digitalisation in collaboration, digitalisation-related sustainability potentials will either not materialise on the firm-level, e.g., due to data sharing concerns, or will tend to be overshadowed by the negative indirect effects of digitalisation, such as rebound effects. We propose three political and managerial levers to enhance the overall socio-ecological performance of the supply chain.

Description: In the wake of digitalization it is increasingly debated whether developing countries can achieve economic prosperity through industrialization in the same manner as developed countries did. At the same time, developing countries have high hopes for digital technologies to drive the transformation of the economy towards prosperity. Literature on structural change views technology as one driver of employment shifts between economic sectors, but underlying mechanisms are often overlooked. Similarly, evidence on digitalization highlights its impacts on employment, but the causes and effects require further investigation. As a consequence, both strands of literature benefit from an integrated perspective on structural change and digitalization, which has largely been lacking. Hence, we pose the following research question: What are potential linkages between structural change and digitalization? Based on a review of the existing literature we identify the drivers of structural change as well as the economic impacts of digitalization on these drivers. We then elaborate on linkages between both strands of literature, showing that digitalization impacts the drivers of structural change in various ways. Evidence suggests that digitalization is likely to affect relative sectoral productivity, but it is questionable whether destinations of subsequent labor movements (e.g. towards traditional services) will equally benefit from technological progress. Moreover, the skill bias of digital technologies may be a risk not only for equitable income gains, but also for inter-firm linkages. Our review further implies that digitalization fosters the servicification of manufacturing and presents opportunities for developing countries to diversify in traded goods and services. However, it is contested if digitalization facilitates better positioning of developing countries in global markets, or if it narrows the scope for their participation and upgrading opportunities in global value chains due to relatively larger benefits for developed countries. We thus highlight various differences between developed and developing countries in the ability to benefit from digitalization. Future studies can empirically test the proposed linkages to reveal technology-, country- and industry-specific interactions between processes of structural change and digitalization.

Description: Industrial production needs to be fundamentally transformed if the UN Sustainable Development Goals shall be met. Digital technologies can potentially drive such a sustainable transformation, but two main objectives of environmental sustainability must be considered for achieving this target: decarbonisation and dematerialisation. We empirically investigate the potentials for these two objectives by employing a survey-based approach, investigating companies’ developments in China, Brazil, and Germany, in a variety of industrial sectors, and in companies of different sizes. These cases provide insight on a multi-country perspective into developments in digitalisation in countries with different pre-conditions for digital transformation, which is a novelty to this research field. We show that even though most industrial practitioners expect an improvement of the environmental sustainability of their respective company due to the application of Industry 4.0 technologies, factual improvements in resource efficiency and energy consumption are not expected to develop in a similarly optimistic fashion. These findings challenge the assumed effects of Industry 4.0 discussed in the vast majority of prior literature which expresses high hopes for positive impacts on resource efficiency and energy consumption . This can be interpreted as an indication that Industry 4.0 will not automatically lead to environmental improvements instead this transformation towards a more sustainable economy needs to be accompanied by supporting measures. On the positive side we find that the higher the current Industry 4.0 level of companies, the greater their ability to match their supply with the actual demand and their likelihood for participating in Demand Response schemes. This is an important prerequisite for the stabilisation and efficient use of future renewable energy systems. Our study provides insigths to policy makers and practitioners but also fellow researchers regarding current trends in the implementation of Industry 4.0 and in how far they support the transformation towards more sustainability. We conclude that the implementation of the Industry 4.0 concept should always be critically evaluated against the background of the SDGs and must be supplemented by a combination of regulation and incentives through governing bodies, which includes setting binding targets for saving energy and material and reducing non-recyclable waste.

Description: Digitalization is creating new patterns of production and consumption and bringing sweeping changes across the economy. The increasing use of information and com-munication technology (ICT) has stirred hopes that this will create new opportunities for economic development and lead to more environmentally friendly production methods. The social and environmental impacts of this digital transformation are only beginning to be understood, and little reliable data on its environmental effects exists. However, some initial trends are already discernible. It remains unclear whether the digital transformation of the economy can be reconciled with the goals of sustainable development. This will depend to a large degree on how the digital transformation is shaped at the national and international levels.