Jobs in Apps

Smartphones and the apps operated on these are becoming an ever more present part of everyday life for billions of people around the world. The market for apps is global in a previously unprecedented way. This means that both small and large players in the industry easily can reach more than 2 bn. smartphone users, by designing their apps for just a few platforms.

The Developers Alliance and Google has asked Copenhagen Economics to assess the App Economy in the Nordic region, with the main focus of quantifying the number of supported jobs today and the potential in the future.

We do this through a careful examination of the industry including multiple interviews with app companies of the Nordic region, combined with a rigorous economic input-output analysis.

We find that the Nordic countries have succeeded in translating a digital frontrunner position into a leading position within the App Economy. Relative to their respective size, the Nordic countries have captured a disproportionally large part of the market and several major players in the app business have their roots in the Nordic region.

The main conclusions of our study are

• Today, the App Economy supports 145,500 high-value-added jobs in the Nordics. Of these, 33,000 are app developers, 16,500 are support jobs within the app firms, while around 31,000 jobs are jobs at suppliers to the app industry (indirect jobs) and 65,000 jobs are supported via the spending of the app employees and their suppliers (the so-called induced effects). The jobs are distributed with 60,000 in Sweden, 34,500 in Denmark, 30,500 in Finland, and 20,500 in Norway.
• Over the next five years, there is a potential of the App Economy adding up to 140,000 supported jobs to the economies of the Nordic countries. This means that the App Economy has the potential of growing the total amount of supported jobs to 285,000 in the Nordic countries by 2021.
• However, app companies are severely hampered by shortages of developers today. This demands immediate action if the potential is to be realised
• Policy choices will influence whether the current Nordic frontrunners will continue to play a leading part in the global App Economy, thus obtaining some of the new high-value jobs. The difference in the number of potential supported jobs by 2021 between good conducive policy and political inaction is up to 115,000.

Download technical appendix

The study is commissioned by Google and the Developers Alliance