The research focuses on the emerging solutions in the European Union and in some of its Member States (Germany, Italy, France, Finland) to promote the creation of quality jobs in an age of rapid industrial transformation. The creation of future “quality jobs” in the context of the digital transformation has been given priority in the past few years at the EU and Member States level. However, also due to the emergency situation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, until recently the EU plans have taken mostly the form of political communications, without the sufficient backing of concrete industrial policy plans. As a matter of fact, while the European Commission has worked with Member States on the launch of very ambitious industry alliances, the Green Deal, as well as an overall agenda aimed at technological sovereignty and strategic autonomy, the concrete impact on jobs of these initiatives has not been explicitly assessed (at least in publicly available documents).
The project has been divided in three phases. An initial scoping phase has been followed by a deep dive into and evaluation of (still sometimes diverging) industrial strategies at the EU level, and finally an in-depth analysis of job creation strategies in some of the Member States.