Green Jobs in the Energy Transition among the Eight Largest Economies: Assessing Employment Quality in Renewable Energy Supply Chains

The global transition toward renewable energy has intensified not only efforts to mitigate climate change and enhance energy security but also expectations regarding the creation of decent and high-quality green jobs. While existing studies largely focus on the quantity of green employment, limited attention has been paid to job quality and how major global shocks reshape green labour markets. This study examines the determinants of green job penetration and green job quality across the eight largest global economies, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Spain, and the United States, over the period 2013–2023. Drawing on structural transformation, energy security, and regulatory theories, the analysis evaluates the roles of renewable energy investment, regulatory quality, energy import dependence, and global supply chain pressure, while explicitly accounting for the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia–Ukraine conflict. Using a combination of Panel-Corrected Standard Errors, Driscoll–Kraay fixed effects, and bias-corrected dynamic panel estimators, the study further decomposes outcomes into pre-COVID (2013–2019), COVID shock (2020–2021), and post-COVID recovery (2022–2023) periods. The findings reveal a clear trade-off between green job penetration and green job quality. Renewable energy investment generally increases green job intensity but, in the post-COVID period, is associated with weaker job quality, suggesting that recovery programmes prioritised speed and scale over employment conditions. Regulatory quality and energy import dependence enhance green job quality but tend to constrain job penetration. Global supply chain pressure stimulates green job creation before COVID-19 but weakens both penetration and quality after the pandemic. Overall, the results underscore the need for integrated energy, labour, and industrial policies that balance employment expansion with decent work standards, thereby advancing SDGs 7, 8, 9, and 13 in the post-pandemic green transition.