By: Iris Smiderle, Filippo Bontadini, Francesco Filippucci, Ettore Gallo, Cecilia Jona-Lasinio, Giuseppe Nicoletti, and Alessandro Saia
The simultaneous shift toward a zero-carbon economy and the rapid advancement of digital technologies, often referred to as the Twin Transition, is fundamentally reshaping global labour markets. As these two structural changes unfold, the demand for new skills and expertise is rising, yet evidence on the prevalence of these skills across different industries and countries has remained scant.
To address this gap, we are pleased to announce the release of a novel, harmonized dataset providing standardized metrics of green and digital intensity for 30 OECD countries. This resource was supported by The Productivity Institute as part of the project “Investment and skills for the twin transition”, and leverages previous work done within the OECD-Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance joint project. We hope this harmonized database can serve as a useful tool for researchers and policymakers to investigate the impact of these transitions on productivity and the workforce.
Traditional "top-down" approaches often classify entire industries as "green" or "digital", which can overlook the nature of the tasks and skills within each occupation. Instead, our dataset employs a task-based and skill-based approach to provide a more accurate representation of the effects of the Twin Transition on the workforce.
● Green Tasks Intensity: We use the U.S. O*NET database to measure the share of green-specific tasks, e.g. those reducing pollution or increasing energy efficiency, within each occupation.
● Digital Skills Intensity: We adopt the European ESCO database to define a skill-based indicator, representing the ratio of essential digital skills to the total skills required for an occupation.
We implement a series of crosswalks to map these metrics to national classifications of occupations and we apply them to national labour force surveys (including the EU-LFS and IPUMS CPS) to infer the distribution of digital and green skills in the workforce. In the published database, we have finallyaggregated these intensities to the ISIC Rev. 4 1-digit industry level, allowing for a standardized, longitudinal analysis from 2011 to 2024.
In our preliminary analyses, we have shown a strong positive correlation between greenness and digitalization, suggesting that these technologies may be mutually reinforcing. However, significant heterogeneity exists across different sectors and countries.
This dataset can be used to:
1. Monitoring the evolution of the Twin Transition over time: investigate to what extent countries enable the environmental transition and digital technological advancements through a recomposition of the workforce.
2. Perform analysis at the Sectoral Level: Identify which industries face the steepest learning curves or labour shortages as they transition, studying how policies can shape targeted policies to address sectoral specific vulnerabilities and harness opportunities.
3. Evaluate Policy Impact: Track how environmental regulations or new digital technological requirements influence the skill composition of the workforce over time.
4. Cross-Country Benchmarking: Compare how labour markets across 30 OECD economies are adjusting to the Twin Transition, using a harmonized framework.
We believe that making this data publicly available is essential for fostering multilateral cooperation and informed structural reforms. The dataset and full methodological paper are now available via Figshare.
● Dataset DOI: 10.48420/31264834
● Methodological Paper: Smiderle, I., et al. (2026). Capturing Green and Digital Intensities: Key Metrics for Monitoring the Twin Transition, https://www.productivity.ac.uk/research/capturing-green-and-digital-intensities-key-metrics-for-monitoring-the-twin-transition.
