Technology Or Upskilling? Trends In The Task Composition Of Jobs In Central And Eastern Europe

In this paper we analyse the changes in the task content of jobs in Central and Eastern European countries between 1998 and 2013. We link the O*NET data on occupational characteristics with EU-LFS, following the approach of Autor, Levy and Murnane (2003) as well as Acemoglu and Autor (2011). We find that the CEE countries witnessed similar trends of rising intensity of non-routine cognitive tasks, and a decreasing intensity of manual tasks, although they differed with regards to changes in the routine cognitive task content. We identify the contribution of structural and within-sector changes to this evolution of tasks. Furthermore, we assess the relative role played by education and technology in the development of task contents. Our results show that workforce upskilling was the major factor behind the evolution of non-routine cognitive and manual tasks in CEE, whereas structural changes have shaped routine cognitive tasks. Finally, we show that the evolution of task content was not uniform across cohorts, and a shift to non-routine tasks was most abundant among the youngest cohorts.