SKILLS AND GLOBAL VALUE CHAINS: A CHARACTERISATION.

Empirical studies have traditionally measured workers' skills by educational attainment or occupational status. Recent literature using country-specific information on the task content of jobs to identify the different skills of individuals argues that neither these proxies measure skills adequately, as large wage heterogeneity still exists within education and occupation classes. This study follows a job taskbased approach and exploits the rich information contained in the OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) to conduct an exploratory state-of-the-art factor analysis. The six task-based skills indicators thus extracted have the characteristic of being comparable across 31 countries and allow clearer interpretation than indicators proposed by previous literature. Moreover, by combining the PIAAC-based skills indicators with data from the OECD Trade in Value Added (TiVA) database, light is shed on the way different skills and their distributions (at the country-industry level) relate to industry performance and to integration into global value chains (GVCs). The results underline the importance of cognitive skills such as literacy, numeracy and problem solving for any industry to thrive in the global economy. Also, a persistent and positive association with labour productivity and participation in GVCs is observed, at the industry level, for non-cognitive skills such as managing and communication skills, ICT skills and workers' readiness to learn and to think creatively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]