EQUAL TREATMENT DOES
IN DEFENCE
NOT ALWAYS TRANSLATE TO EQUAL OUTCOMES COUNTRY: South Africa SCHOOL: Stellenbosch Business School, University of Stellenbosch
OF ROBOTS COUNTRY: Denmark SCHOOL: Aarhus BSS, Aarhus University Rather than causing humans to lose their jobs, robots lead to more employment and an upsurge in productivity, according to a study by the Aarhus University School of Business and Social Sciences (Aarhus BSS). “The myth of robots stealing our jobs is false”, said Michael Koch, an associate professor from the Department of Economics and Business Economics at Aarhus BSS. Robot-adopting companies among 5,500 manufacturing firms in Spain were found to increase their overall output by 20-25%, reduce the labour cost share by 5-7% and experience net job creation at a rate of 10% on average over four years. These were the findings of a paper penned by Koch, together with fellow researchers at Aarhus BSS and Europa-Universität Flensburg. The researchers argue that it is their unique dataset that offers new insights. “It gave us the opportunity to do something entirely new within research into the effect of automation: to investigate the microeconomic impact of robots all the way down to the level of individual firms, as opposed to the majority of existing research, which has been preoccupied with the overall macroeconomic effect”, Koch explained. The data in question stems from annual surveys covering the years 1990 to 2016, which allowed researchers to track the adoption of robots in individual firms against other measurements, such as productivity, costs and job numbers. Across the whole time period, firms adopting robots in their manufacturing processes increased the number of jobs by 50% on average. There was an average decrease of 20% in job numbers among firms which did not adopt robots at any point during the same period of 26 years. “We had expected the adoption of robots to cause employment to decrease, just like many other macro-level studies have shown”, said Koch. The study, published in The Economic Journal , has picked up a Royal Economic Society award for best paper. (TBD)
VAT and income tax have a disproportionate impact on women, especially single mothers. This was the conclusion reached by Lee-Ann Steenkamp, head of the Postgraduate Diploma in Financial Planning at Stellenbosch Business School and contributor to the 2022 Women’s Report . The report was released by the SA Board for People Practices (SABPP) in partnership with Stellenbosch Business School. During the apartheid years in South Africa, women suffered discriminatory tax systems that especially disadvantaged working married women. When this was repealed after 1994, the law changed and both men and women were taxed the same, regardless of marital status. Now, single-earning households only benefit from one tax rebate, meaning they are disadvantaged by tax. This disproportionately impacts women, as the report found that more than 40% of South African households are headed by sole female breadwinners and that 41.7% of children live with single mothers; only 4.4% live with single fathers. The report also found that while women make up nearly half of taxpayers (46%), they only contribute one third of the total tax paid, signifying that they are concentrated in the lower tax brackets. Despite this, women were found to be left with higher costs; as primary caregivers they spend more on the collective household needs such as food, health and education, and therefore pay more VAT in general on these items. To allow for a more equal distribution of wealth, Steenkamp proposed that higher tax thresholds for women, tax breaks for female- owned businesses, reduced tax rates on property owned by women and tax deductions for childcare costs should be introduced. She also suggested that wider access to free or affordable healthcare, education, water and social protection would free up women’s income. (EB)
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