Our goal in UNTANGLED is to examine the impact of globalisation, technological transformations and demographic change on labour markets in the European Union, and to recommend policies that will contribute to shared prosperity. These megatrends are accelerating and intertwine with each other in a series of dependencies affecting skills, inequality, labour mobility and migration. Ageing societies, automation, AI, migration, global value chains and Industry 4.0 are just some of the factors that are changing the nature of work.
In this interdisciplinary project, we seek to untangle these trends, measure their impact and identify the groups that are at risk. We also map scenarios for how they will develop at the level of particular sectors, regions and the EU. As part of our effort to ensure we have a wide variety of regional perspectives, institutions from three continents beyond Europe are also participating in the project. Based on our analyses, we will propose policies to reap the benefits of the three megatrends and cushion their negative impacts, promoting fairness and prosperity for the people of Europe and beyond.
We aim to answer three main research questions:
- What are the effects of technological transformation, globalisation, and demographic trends on labour market outcomes, skills, inequality, and labour mobility and migration in Europe?
- What are the plausible scenarios for these mega-trends and their impacts in the decades to come?
- Which combinations of policies will be most effective in managing these mega-trends towards shared prosperity?
Project’s website
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This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101004776.
news
The conference took place in Leuven on 23 October 2023. Researchers originating from over 15 institutions presented the results of about 30 research papers. Zuzanna Kowalik and Karol Madoń represented IBS.
The one-day UNTANGLED workshop brought together labour market economists from European universities and research institutes to discuss and reflect on ten papers on the evolution of skills and the value of skills.
The Conference, titled “Labour market effects and social impact of technological transformation, globalisation and demographic change”, took place on 9 November in Brussels, attracting 16 papers and 45 participants.
Piotr Lewandowski and Maciej Albinowski presented the results of two studies at the “TASKS VI” conference hosted by the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) in Nuremberg
On the 25 of March 2022, a workshop summarizing the first year of the UNTANGLED project took place in Vienna. We presented the results of three studies on the impact of technology on the labour market and income inequality in Europe
Karol Madoń presented the results of his research at the Future of Work-online conference on February 24-25, 2022
Our research at the 26th Annual Conference of the Society of Labour Economists – May 14-15th, 2021
Publications
2023-12-18
Automation In Shared Service Centres: Implications For Skills And Autonomy In A Global Organisation
The offshoring-fuelled growth of the Central and Eastern European business services sector gave rise to shared service centres (SSCs), quasi-autonomous entities providing routine-intensive tasks for the central organisation. The advent of technologies like Intelligent Process Automation, Robotic Process Automation, and Artificial Intelligence jeopardises SSCs’ employment ...
2023-10-09
Automation and income inequality in Europe
We study the effects of robot penetration on household income inequality in 14 European countries between 2006–2018, a period marked by the rapid adoption of industrial robots. We establish that, similarly to the United States, automation reduced relative hourly wages and employment of directly affected ...
We study the age- and gender-specific labour market effects of two key modern technologies – Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), and robots – in 14 European countries between 2010-2018. To identify the causal effects of technology adoption, we utilize the variation of technology adoption between ...
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