Assessing Green Job Dynamics in the EU A Comparison of Alternative Methodologies

As the green transition is set to accelerate swiftly over the next decades, its implications for labour markets and workers are of key concern to policymakers. The aim of this paper is to review different methodologies to identify green jobs in cross-country comparable data that are regularly and timely available for EU Member States and assess their usefulness for policy-relevant labour market analysis. Three different methodologies are compared, of which one draws on Eurostat's environmental accounts (EGSS) data. The two other methodologies use EU Labour Force Survey (LFS) data to implement taskbased approaches. The first task-based approach uses information on occupational task profiles from O*NET data, in line with several other existing studies. The second task-based approach uses a more novel source of information on occupational skills profiles, notably the European Classification of Occupations, Skills and Competences (ESCO). Two out of the three indicators show a rising trend in green jobs over recent years. Sectors such as industry, construction and agriculture account for the bulk of the green jobs; even if the proportion of service jobs among green jobs is on the rise. Green jobs are more likely to be taken up by men than non-green jobs. The geographical and skills distributions of green jobs depend on the methodology used. Based on the presented analysis, the national accounts (EGSS)-based approach seems the most reliable. Nevertheless, given its constraints in terms of opportunities for socioeconomic analysis, it still seems useful to consider other approaches to get at richer insights, while consistently verifying the robustness of results across different methodologies.