Following a market-oriented approach, policies aimed at increasing labour flexibility by weakening employment protection institutions should enable firms to efficiently allocate resources, improve their capability to compete on international markets and adjust to economic cycle. This work documents the rise of non-standard (i.e. temporary and part-time) work in five European countries (Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom) over the period 1994-2016 and investigate the nexus between the use of non-standard work and innovation performance using data for 18 manufacturing and 23 service industries. Contrary to the objectives that market-oriented policy recommendations promised to achieve, we show that there is a significantly negative association between the share of workers employed under nonstandard contractual arrangements and the introduction of both product and process innovation. Furthermore, we show that the harmful consequences of the spread of non-standard work on firms' product innovation propensity are more pronounced in high-tech sectors.

This article investigates the relationship between the diffusion of digital technologies, employment, and skills. The empirical analysis is carried out on industry-level data of six major European economies (Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and the UK) over the 2009–2014 period. We analyze two dimensions of digitalization: industries’ consumption of intermediate inputs from digitally intensive sectors and investment in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tangible and intangible assets, considering also patterns of demand, education, technological change, and offshoring. The results show that job creation in industries is positively associated with an increasing share of digital goods and services in total intermediate inputs and is negatively linked with processes of ICT capital deepening. We then explore how these two different patterns of digitalization are related to the evolution of four occupational groups—managers, clerks, craft, and Manual workers, defined on the basis of International Standard Classification of Occupations classes—finding a positive link between ICT consumption and managerial jobs, and negative ones between digital variables and mid-skill occupations.

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