# 1. Introduction

There is a growing body of literature investigating the labor market consequences of scaling up “green” policies.<sup>1</sup> However, most of the evidence is focused on the labor market implications for developed economies, and little is known about the consequences of greener growth on jobs for developing countries.<sup>2</sup> While rich countries account for a disproportionate share of Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHGE; see IPCC, 2022), developing economies are expected to experience a disproportionate increase in GHGE in the future (Black et al., 2022). In addition, policies to promote a greener growth strategy may induce a skill-biased shift in labor demand, potentially creating bottlenecks in developing countries with lower stocks and adaptability of skills. This shift would raise concerns about the transition path of displaced workers to new jobs in the green economy.

This paper contributes to this literature by developing a new dataset on green occupations for 120 countries. It describes new statistics on green occupations across countries at different levels of economic development. This offers an initial picture of how the availability (or scarcity) of green occupations can affect the implementation of green policies and their impact on the labor market. The paper then focuses on Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) countries to provide more granular insights into the relationship between green occupations, green sectors, and the socio-economic profile of green job holders.<sup>3</sup> Green occupations are measured following the “Green Economy” program developed by the Occupational Information Network (O*NET).<sup>4</sup> It considers three types of occupations: new occupations that are emerging directly because of green policies (“ _new and emerging_ ”), existing occupations that are expected to experience changes in the tasks they entail (“ _enhanced skills_ ”), and existing occupations that will not change substantially but that will be in higher demand (“ _increased demand_ ”). A methodological contribution of this paper is to develop a mapping of the O*NET classification of green occupations into the 4-digit International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO)-08 taxonomy.

Using detailed occupational tabulations (2-digit ISCO-08) from labor force surveys for 120 countries from 2011 to 2020,<sup>5</sup> the paper finds that, on average, 21.4 percent of employment is in green occupations, and

> 1 A broad definition of green policies includes all policies to remove barriers to green, clean, and resilient growth (see Awe, 2012).

> 2 Some exceptions include the 2011 UNEP ILO Green Jobs report. More recently, see the 2018 ILO Greening with Jobs report and <u>2021 K4D FDCO Creating Green Jobs in Developing Countries report. See also Timilsina (2022) for a discussion of related issues.</u> 3 See also Alfonso et al. (2022) for a recent analysis of green jobs in LAC.

> 4 O*NET is a database developed by the U.S. Department of Labor on occupational information for the U.S. workforce (see <u>https://www.onetcenter.org/overview.html).</u>

> 5 Data is available for each year in the period 2012-2019 for a set of 47 countries.

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