We derive the skill content of thirty countries, ranging from low to high income ones,
from the occupational structure of their economies. Five different skills are defined, as proposed
initially for the United States by Autor, Levy and Murnane (2003), and later updated by
Acemoglu and Autor (2010). Cross country measures of skill content show that the intensity of
national production of manual skills declines with per capita income in a monotonic way, while
it increases for non-routine cognitive and interpersonal skills. For some countries, we are able to
trace the development of skill intensities of aggregate production over time. We find that while
the increasing intensity of non-routine skills is uniform across countries, patterns of skill
intensities with respect to different forms of routine skills differ markedly