The diffusion of industrial robots in Europe: regional or country effect?

The article examines whether the adoption of advanced manufacturing technologies (AMT), proxied by industrial robot penetration, is better explained by regional characteristics or national-level factors across 137 regions in the five largest European economies (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the UK) after the 2008 financial crisis. Using data on robot acquisitions and regional industry employment, the study applies measures of related variety (RV), unrelated variety (UV), and an unsupervised machine learning method called Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) to classify regional industrial profiles. The findings indicate a significant country-level effect in explaining robot adoption growth, suggesting national innovation systems (NIS) and policies play a dominant role, although regional factors such as RV and human capital also have a statistically significant but smaller impact. Notably, no specific regional industry mix strongly predicts robot adoption growth, but regions characterized by traditional, labor-intensive manufacturing in France and Italy show declining robot adoption. These results imply that policy interventions might be more effective if focused on national structural reforms rather than solely on regional investments, while also recognizing the importance of regional human capital and related industrial diversity.