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This paper provides novel evidence on the economic impact of industrial automation in a large developing economy. It combines labor force survey and manufacturing plant-level data from Indonesia over 2008-15, when the country experienced a rapid increase in imports of robots. The findings show a positive impact of robots on various measures of plants' performance and integration into global value chains. In contrast to existing evidence on advanced and emerging economies, these plant-level impacts result in an increase in manufacturing and services employment at the local level. Such employment effects are consistent with evidence of positive employment spillovers from downstream robot-adopting plants, which help extend the benefits of automation to non-adopting plants. The spillover effects may provide a rationale to incentivize manufacturing firms to adopt industrial robots. The results also suggest that the gains from automation are not equally shared: adoption of robots is associated with a reduction in the labor share in value added and an increase in skill wage premia.

Automation --- Education --- Employment --- Employment and Unemployment --- Global Value Chain --- Global Value Chains and Business Clustering --- Industrial Economics --- Industry --- Labor Force Survey --- Labor Markets --- Private Sector Development --- Productivity --- Robots --- Secondary Education --- Technology Innovation

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This paper provides novel evidence on the impact of changes in energy prices on manufacturing performance in two large developing economies-Indonesia and Mexico. It finds that unlike increases in electricity prices, which harm plants' performance, fuel price hikes result in higher productivity and profits of manufacturing plants. The results of instrumental variable estimation imply that a 10 percent increase in fuel prices would lead to a 3.3 percent increase in total factor productivity for Indonesian and 1.2 percent for Mexican plants. The evidence suggests that effects are driven by the incentives that fuel price increases provide to plants towards replacing inefficient fuel-powered with more productive electricity-powered capital equipment. These results help to re-evaluate the policy trade-off between reducing carbon emissions and improving economic performance, particularly in countries with large fuel subsidies such as Indonesia and Mexico.

Electric Power --- Electricity --- Energy --- Energy Demand --- Energy Policies and Economics --- Energy Price --- Firm Performance --- Fuel Price --- Fuel Subsidy --- Industrial Economics --- Industry --- Oil and Gas --- Private Sector Development --- Private Sector Economics --- Productivity --- Technology Adoption