Directorate for Science, Technology and Innovation
The green side of productivity
An international classification of green and brown occupations
This paper describes the methodology used for crosswalking occupation-based measures
of Green (“environmentally friendly”) and Brown (“polluting”) jobs from the Standard
Occupational Classification (SOC) system to the International Standard Occupation
Classification (ISCO) 08 at the most detailed (4-digit) level. The original, task-based
Greenness scores by Vona et al. (2018) are provided at the 8-digit SOC level, and
the industry-based Brownness measures are provided in 6-digit SOC. Crosswalking these
measures requires several choices in terms of weighting and aggregating, which this
paper describes in detail. The robustness of the resulting measures to the different
weighting options and underlying assumption is tested using Linked Employer-Employee
data from Portugal. An empirical application to the Productivity-Greenness link at
the firm level shows the robustness of this link to different weighting choices, and
confirms that all of the different measures derived are consistent in measuring the
Greenness of jobs.