The Impact of the Institutions on Regional Unemployment Disparities in Europe

The main aim of this paper is to study European regional disparities in unemployment, considering regional productive structures and some regional institutional variables. It is widely known that one most important stylized facts concerning the EU consists in regional disparities among regions. Such differences relate to both income per capita and the labour market, the latter generally measured in terms of unemployment rates. In a recent paper (Amendola, Caroleo Coppola, 2004) we have analysed the economic structure of the EU’s regions using proxies for the productive structure and the labour market. In this paper we estimate a panel data model where the dependent variable is the regional unemployment rate and the independent variables relate to the productive structure and some regional institutional aspects. The results confirm that institutional variables, such as the centralization of wage bargaining, the decentralization of public expenditure and the level of bureaucracy, have important impacts on unemployment rates.