Eco-Innovation and Employment: A Task-Based Analysis

Abstract

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Going Green: Estimating the Potential of Green Jobs in Argentina

“…The resulting greenness scores at the 2-digit ISCO level are shown in Figure 1. The results are very similar to previous literature (Vona et al, 2018;Elliott et al, 2021;Rutzer and Niggli, 2020;Lobsiger and Rutzer, 2021). Occupations with the highest green potential are science and engineering professionals, managers, assemblers, whereas among those with the lowest green potential we find health and personal services workers, and clerks.…”

“…The O*NET database contains not only detailed information on the task and skill content of occupations but also detailed text descriptions for a subset of tasks specific to each occupation. Furthermore, the 'Green Economy Program' developed by O*NET details the work tasks of green jobs allowing researchers to understand the changes in occupation and skill requirements that may be triggered when a country transitions to a greener economy (Elliott et al, 2021). This information can then be used to identify green jobs based on two broad types of definitions: i) a binary definition where an occupation is considered either green or non-green; ii) a continuous definition of occupational greenness that exploits information on the greenness of the task content of occupations (Vona, 2021).…”

“…Specifically, we calculate the greenness scores proposed in Vona (2021) in the O*NET dataset at the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) level, and then extrapolate them to the Argentine occupational classification to impute them to each person employed in the PHS. This procedure has already been applied in several papers (Rutzer and Niggli, 2020;Lobsiger and Rutzer, 2021;Elliott et al, 2021;Valero et al, 2021) and is common in the automation literature (Gasparini et al, 2020;Brambilla et al, 2021) and more recently in the teleworking literature (Albrieu, 2020;Foschiatti and Gasparini, 2020;de la Vega, 2021). As stated in the previous section, these studies have been criticized because the task content varies depending on the level of development and, therefore, it would not be correct to extrapolate estimates based on the United States to other countries, particularly emerging ones (Dicarlo et al, 2016;Bello et al, 2019).…”

“…Finally, to identify green jobs we follow previous literature which defines those jobs as high green potential occupations. Elliott et al (2021) consider an individual to be a green worker if their corresponding occupational greenness score is greater than the average greenness (0.189 in their sample). Similarly, Lobsiger and Rutzer (2021) define high-green-potential occupations as those with green potential larger or equal to 0.5.…”

“…This step is very common in the literature (see, for example, OECD (2017),Goos et al (2014),Consoli et al (2016),Vona et al (2018),Elliott et al (2021),Rutzer and Niggli (2020)). 13 Indeed, other papers that extrapolate greenness indicators from O*NET to ISCO apply a simple average at each step.…”