Impacts of techonological innovation on employment: The Brazilian manufacturing case

Presented at the GLOBELICS 6th International Conference 2008 22-24 September, Mexico City, Mexico.The aim of this study is to investigate the impacts of technological innovation on employment growth. These impacts are separated according to the type of innovation - process or product innovation - due to possible different correlations between these types of innovation and employment growth. Also, it is verified if the presence of technological innovation has a bias due to qualification. The empirical investigation uses Brazilian surveys database with firm’s micro data. The results suggest that process innovation has no significant effect on employment. Product innovation, on the contrary, tends to increase significantly the employment rate. The positive compensation effects due to the employment growth through product innovation are bigger than the negative effect due to productivity gains. And technological innovation bias was not significant after verifying that skilled labor intensive firms have the same behavior than the others. This last result pointed out to the absence a technological innovation bias