The distribution of tasks in Europe: New evidence from the Labour Force Survey

The tasks approach has become central to the analysis of labour markets, technological change and job quality, yet comprehensive data sources offering detailed, country-level task profiles remain scarce, leaving open the question of how far tasks actually vary across national contexts. This paper addresses that gap using the novel 2022 ad hoc module of the European Labour Force Survey, which provides rich individual-level information on tasks performed by workers across 22 European countries. We pursue three objectives. First, to identify the underlying dimensional structure of tasks in Europe and assess whether it is stable across countries. Second, to quantify the relative contribution of occupation, industry, worker and job characteristics, and most importantly national context to variation in task content. Third, to distinguish whether cross-country differences reflect differences in occupational composition or different ways of performing the same job across national settings, challenging the common assumption of occupation-task similarity across countries. We find that task indicators cluster into four broad dimensions (information processing, autonomy, social tasks, and physical and routine work) a structure that is remarkably stable across countries. Occupation is the dominant structured source of task variation, while industry plays only a marginal role; country-specific factors are substantial and consistently exceed workers' sociodemographic characteristics, workplace factors and industry in determining the distribution of tasks. These results carry important policy implications, offering new evidence on how work is organised across Europe and on the task content underlying occupations. Since tasks constitute the activities through which skills are deployed and developed at work, understanding their distribution is essential for anticipating changing skill needs, strengthening skills intelligence, and designing effective training and labour market policies.