Multi-Country Tasks Measures: Beyond US-based Data and a Focus on Migration

We claim that the OECD dataset PIAAC (Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies) could provide a valid alternative to the US-based O*NET database in order to obtain country-specific task measures. The US presence in PIAAC allows to compare the two datasets by computing the same task indexes twice. We find that correlation coefficients between aggregate task indexes are very high (rarely less than 0.7). Focusing on European countries, we recommend the PIAAC-based task measures for future domestic and multi-country analysis (e.g. on the effects of migration in the labor markets) since task indexes appear very different among European economies.