A simple theoretical framework is presented, enabling the assessment of the government’s role in industrial and regional labour reallocation that follow from large-scale restructuring in the labour market. The experiences of East Germany and Poland in this regard are then compared and...

This book brings together up-to-date findings on the regional dimensions of European labour markets. It provides a conceptual and empirical study of the interactions between the European economy and its regions, paying particular attention to the issue of the transition of Central and Eastern...

A frontier approach is utilised to estimate a matching function (reparameterised as a Beveridge curve) on data for the main Italian territorial areas (North, Centre, South) throughout the 1990s. The Southern labour market proves to be much less efficient than that in the rest of the country,...

Building on Layard and Jackman's framework, we propose a simple model to analyse the relation between labour productivity and unemployment regional differentials in Italy and present some panel data evidence to support the theoretical predictions of the model. The empirical analysis strongly...

Despite the centrality of the issue of labour market flexibility, attempts to consistently measure levels of flexibility, either within or across countries, have been remarkably scarce. This chapter makes a contribution towards filling this gap by presenting a complete set of labour market...

This paper aims at analyzing whether Labour Market Programs (ALMP) could have different effects on unemployment and employment dynamics according to the particular region where the program is implemented. To this end, the research analyses alternative theoretical and econometric models thought...

New Economic Geography models usually abstract from unemployment. By contrast, wage curve models (Blanchflower and Oswald, 1994) imply a negative correlation between regional unemployment and wages, but fail to account for agglomeration effects. Relying upon some stylised facts concerning the...

This paper surveys the now large body of theoretical and empirical literature on regional unemployment during transition in Central and Eastern Europe. The focus is on Optimal Speed of Transition models and on comparison of them with the neoclassical tradition. In the typical neoclassical...

This paper aims to analyse the relationships between firms’ location decisions and local labour markets functioning in a spatial economics perspective. In this way we are able to show that spatial factors are crucial to the design and implementation of labour policies since firms’ and...

This paper considers the evolution of employment across 145 European regions (between 1983 and 1997) at a level of industrial disaggregation greater than that usually considered in the literature. The results highlight that, in the first place, national boundaries are not particularly...