Knowledge-intensive employment growth in the Dutch Randstad and the German Rhine-Ruhr area: the impact of centrality and peripherality

This paper investigates to what extent the different subsectors of the knowledge economy are subject to sector-specific spatial patterns of employment dynamics, and whether these patterns are conditional upon the general economic climate in a particular region. To this end, we analyze and compare patterns of employment growth in the knowledge economy and its subsectors in the different settlement zones of the (growing) Dutch Randstad and the (declining) German Rhine-Ruhr area, thus investigating the impact of centrality respectively peripherality within a polycentric metropolitan region on municipal knowledge-intensive employment growth. Our results show that with respect to knowledge-intensive employment, both the Randstad and the Rhine-Ruhr area exhibit sector-specific spatial patterns of employment dynamics. Furthermore, centrality and peripherality are found to play important roles in determining municipal knowledge-intensive employment growth, suggesting that the location of a municipality within a metropolitan region affects its employment dynamics, and this impact differs both between sectors, and between regions being subject to either growth or decline.