The impact of digitalization on unemployment : the case of the Nordic countries

The topic of digitalization has a high relevance in the literature nowadays, where many authors try to figure out the impact of digitalization on the labour market in the short and long terms. Some authors argue that the process of digitalization creates new jobs, whereas others claim that it increases unemployment. The Nordic countries, such as Iceland, Finland, Norway, Denmark and Sweden are the leading countries in terms of digitalization on the European continent, and the estimation of an impact of digitalization on unemployment has a high relevance for these countries. The paper assesses the impact of digitalization on the unemployment rate in the Nordic countries with help of the robust OLS regression in STATA, for the period of 1991–2019. Results show that digitalization on average has a high significance and a negative association with the variable of unemployment. The increase of the variable of digitalization by 1% on average leads to a decrease in the unemployment rate by 0.025% in the Nordic countries