1887

OECD Economics Department Working Papers

Working papers from the Economics Department of the OECD that cover the full range of the Department’s work including the economic situation, policy analysis and projections; fiscal policy, public expenditure and taxation; and structural issues including ageing, growth and productivity, migration, environment, human capital, housing, trade and investment, labour markets, regulatory reform, competition, health, and other issues.

The views expressed in these papers are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the OECD or of the governments of its member countries.

English, French

Doing green things: skills, reallocation, and the green transition

The need to rapidly decarbonise economies raises questions about whether countries’ workforces possess the requisite skills to achieve the net zero transition as well as the capacity to redeploy workers from “brown” to “green” jobs. This paper applies a task-based framework to granular data from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) and country-specific employment sources to generate new indicators of the green skills structure of labour markets for a large number of OECD countries and non-OECD EU countries. Significant cross-country differences emerge in the underlying supply of green skill and the potential of economies to reallocate brown job workers to green jobs within their broad occupation categories. In a majority of detailed brown occupations, workers have in principle the necessary skills to transition to green jobs, with the exception of those in production occupations, who may require more extensive re-skilling. In contrast, workers from most highly automatable occupations are generally not found to have the sufficient skills to transition to green jobs, suggesting more limited scope for the net-zero transition to reinstate labour displaced by automation.

English

Keywords: reallocation, green transition, green skills
JEL: J82: Labor and Demographic Economics / Labor Standards: National and International / Labor Standards: Labor Force Composition; J68: Labor and Demographic Economics / Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers / Mobility, Unemployment, and Vacancies: Public Policy; J62: Labor and Demographic Economics / Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers / Job, Occupational, and Intergenerational Mobility; J24: Labor and Demographic Economics / Demand and Supply of Labor / Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
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