Germany Needs to Catch Up in the Areas of E-Government and the Digitalisation of SMEs

As part of the Leibniz Economic Summit in Berlin, the president of the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), Professor Achim Wambach, engaged in a discussion on “Digitalisation and the Labour Market” with the heads of other economic research institutions also belonging to the Leibniz Association. Professor Achim Wambach comments on the matter:

“The advancing digitalisation will bring about fundamental changes for the labour markets. Calculations conducted by ZEW have shown that by 2040, around nine per cent of current jobs in 21 OECD countries (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) will be technically automatable. This is undoubtedly a considerable amount of jobs being cut – the share is, however, much smaller than expected.

Digitalisation is not a job killer. Instead of replacing professions as such, it rather automates certain tasks at the workplace, since almost all jobs involve activities that cannot be performed by machines. Nevertheless, employees, and low-skilled workers in particular, are increasingly coming under pressure to adapt to the new work environment. As a consequence, there is a great need for further education and retraining schemes. This holds for employees working in public administration as well as in private companies.

The areas in which Germany particularly needs to catch up are e-government, the digitalisation and connectedness of public services, and the digitalisation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Indeed, more than 80 per cent of German SMEs have implemented digitalisation projects between 2013 and 2015; the progress of digitalisation is, however, still developing at too slow a pace.”