New technology - new jobs? : The case of mobile telecommunications in Sweden

Sammanfattning: This is a study about employment effects of technological change. The concept of employment effects here refers to changes in number of employees in economic activities as a result of technological change. Technological change, in turn, refers to product innovation and process innovation. Theory on employment effects of product and process innovation is applied to the case of mobile telecommunications inSweden. The purpose is to investigate if product innovation is more favourable to employment creation than process innovation, as suggested by earlier research.The empirical part of this study starts with a mapping of Swedish mobile telecommunications firms, including both goods-producing (manufacturing) and services-producing firms (Chapter 4). Chapter 5 provides examples of activities, innovations, and employment effects of innovations in a few of the largest equipment-producing firms and the network operating firms. In Chapter 6 subindustries in mobile telecommunications are compared to 'corresponding' subindustriesin the rest of the Swedish telecommunications. R&D data together withproduct life cycle theory is used as a proxy to specify differences between the subindustries with respect to product and process innovations. The differences in innovation described by the proxy are then related to differences in employment growth between the sub-industries. Chapter 6 also widens the analysis to include the relation between employment growth and economic output growth, by focusing on labour productivity growth and the employment intensity of growth. The fmal empirical chapter (Chapter 7) presents and analyses the results from a survey oninnovation and employment in Swedish mobile telecommunications firms in 1998- 2000.This study concludes that product innovation is more favourable to employment creation than process innovation. It must, however, be added that the evidence from the empirical part of this study indicates that product and process innovation co-exist to a great extent.