Abstract
There is a growing body of literature exploring the skill content of jobs. This paper contributes to this research by using data on the task content of occupations in developing countries, instead of U.S. data, as most existing studies do. The paper finds that indexes based on U.S. data do not provide a fair approximation of the levels, changes, and drivers of the routine cognitive and nonroutine manual skill content of jobs in developing countries. The paper also uncovers three new stylized facts. First, while developed countries tend to have jobs more intensive in nonroutine cognitive skills than developing countries, income (in growth and levels) is not associated with the skill content of jobs once the analysis accounts for other factors. Second, although adoption of information and communications technology is linked to job de-routinization, international trade is an offsetting force. Last, adoption of information and communications technology is correlated with lower employment growth in countries with a high share of occupations that are intensive in routine tasks.
Highlights
We use skill surveys from developing countries – i.e. the Skills Toward Employability and Productivity (STEP) surveys - to create indicators of the task content of jobs comparable to those based on O*NET for the US.1. We find that both sets of measures are consistent regarding the relative non-routine cognitive and routine manual task content of jobs across countries and over time
The routine manual skill content of jobs has a significant and positive link with GDP growth, a finding consistent with occupations intensive in routine manual tasks being concentrated in more volatile industries over the business cycle (Foote and Ryan, 2015)
While ICT adoption is linked to job de-routinization, international trade is an offsetting force
Summary
There is a growing body of literature that investigates trends in the skill content of jobs in developed and developing countries. To estimate the task content of jobs, most studies rely on measures tailored for the US economy, where occupations are ranked by the tasks they typically require. These occupation-level measures are applied to other countries under the assumption that the task content of occupations is the same as in the United States (see, for example, Apella and Zunino, 2018; Arias et al, 2014). This is a strong assumption, considering that jobs may require different skill sets across countries.
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