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

Stefanos Tyros, Dan Andrews and Alain de Serres

No 1763, OECD Economics Department Working Papers from OECD Publishing

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: green skills; green transition; reallocation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 J62 J68 J82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-07-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env, nep-lma and nep-tid
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oec:ecoaaa:1763-en

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