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

This paper reviews 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.

Highlights

• The paper reviews three different methodologies to identify green jobs in data from EU Member States.
• One methodology relies on Eurostat’s environmental accounts data, the other two reflect task-based approaches that combine information from O*NET and ESCO with EU labour force survey data.
• Overall, results suggest a modest growth in green jobs and reveal diverging sectoral, regional, skills-, age- and gender-based patterns.
• The environmental accounts data seem the most precise; but present limitations in their scope for socio-economic analysis.
• Therefore, it seems useful to complement those data with other approaches, including task-based approaches, to gain richer insights, while consistently verifying the robustness of results across different methodologies.

Information and identifiers

Discussion Paper 206. July 2024. Brussels. PDF. 36pp. Tab. Graph. Bibliogr. Free.

KC-BD-23-023-EN-N (online) 
ISBN 978-92-68-01824-8 (online) 
ISSN 2443-8022 (online)
doi:10.2765/350446 (online)

JEL classification: J21, J23, J24.

Disclaimer

European Economy Discussion Papers are written by the staff of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs, or by experts working in association with them, to inform discussion on economic policy and to stimulate debate. The views expressed in this document are solely those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official views of the European Commission.