How do countries position themselves in the global green value chain? What are the implications for green skills? This paper attempts to answer these questions by developing a number of theoretical expectations based on recent comparative political economy (CPE) literature and by testing them empirically through a newly compiled dataset. We focus in particular on countries’ performance in three key segments of the green transition (innovation, manufacturing and deployment) and on the associated demand for green skills. Challenging the emergent CPE consensus of a division of labour between countries in the global green value chain, we find that the global green economy is by and large dominated by a handful of Nordic and Continental European CMEs that do not specialize in one segment of the green transition but rather perform strongly across innovation, manufacturing and deployment. At the same time, we find that different green skills bundle coherently around different segments of the green transition: green innovation triggers demand for green professional jobs underpinned by high-level skills; green manufacturing produces strong demand for high and medium-high technical skills; and deployment positively correlates with intermediate vocational skills. Our findings suggest that existing CPE heuristics may be ill-suited to make sense of how the green transition has been unfolding across affluent countries.

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