Three researchers from Corvinus University, Izabella Kuncz, Petra Németh and Eszter Szabó-Bakos, used simulations based on South Korea, Australia, Italy, Hungary and Türkiye to explore how population ageing and robotisation interact and influence long-term economic performance. 

Their findings show that, in the short term, ageing increases the use of robots in all five countries, despite their different demographic and technological characteristics. As the workforce shrinks, companies increasingly turn to machines to replace human labour. 

Previous research has suggested that ageing societies tend to save more, which can push down interest rates and, in turn, reduce the cost of renting robots, making automation more attractive to businesses. The new Corvinus study, however, finds that the pace of robotisation is influenced more strongly by the share of highly skilled workers and the technological structure of production than by the speed of population ageing itself. 

In economies where technology is designed to make greater use of highly skilled labour, the number of robots grows faster and more significantly. 

However, increasing the proportion of highly skilled workers does not automatically lead to faster growth in GDP per capita. There is also a natural demographic limit to automation. As the number of working-age people with high incomes and the capacity to save declines, fewer people are able to finance further investment in robots. Robot adoption may therefore expand considerably, but the process cannot continue indefinitely. 

“The benefits of automation are not distributed evenly, and the extent to which it can mitigate the economic costs of ageing, and for how long, varies considerably between countries. In Hungary and Türkiye, for example, GDP per capita may temporarily increase, partly because production relies more heavily on lower-skilled labour, which can be replaced by robots more easily. In South Korea, Australia and Italy, however, GDP per capita is expected to decline as a result of robotisation,” the authors said. 

The study also finds that robots often replace traditional forms of capital. As a result, growth in the number of robots does not necessarily mean that the economy’s overall capital stock will increase. 

At the same time, the relative wage income of highly skilled workers declines. This may narrow the wage gap between higher- and lower-skilled employees, while a growing share of total income comes from capital and automation rather than wages. 

The Republic of Korea is currently the world’s most automated country. According to data from the International Federation of Robotics, there were around 1,000 robots per 10,000 employees in 2023. In Hungary, the corresponding figure is estimated to be only around one tenth of that level. 

The study was published in the September 2026 volume of Technology in Society.