COVID-19 IMPACTS ON INDUSTRY ROBOTIZATION
COVID-19 IMPACTS ON INDUSTRY ROBOTIZATION

Summary/Abstract: The advancement in technological developments and recent Covid-19 impacts lead to continuous robotization in industries, especially in the manufacturing sector. As we were interested in impacts on the economy (and society), we analysed some economic indicators in comparison with data on industrial robots installations to present recent developments in the industry. We focused on changes due to Covid-19 as we expected that the pandemic had positive impacts on the manufacturing sector in terms of accelerating progress to the next level of industry development - to Industry 4.0 and even to some extent to Industry 5.0 stage. After the strong robotization of industry in the pre-Covid-19 period, a hindered demand was observed during the pandemic, as also a decline in manufacturing output and employment. Nonetheless, trends quickly regained growth, while the vector autoregression model forecast shows, that the manufacturing sector has a bright future ahead since robotization will be able to increase employment and output of workers, which is also a goal of Industry 4.0 and 5.0. This implies that investments in industrial robots proved to be beneficial also during the pandemic periods and that the Covid-19 pandemic did not have negative impacts on the ongoing transformation of industry. Robotization thus led to recent positive developments in the manufacturing sector, despite some negative impacts were observed in the pre-Covid-19 period.

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