The aim of this book is to contribute to the debate on the continuity/fracture of regional patterns of development and employment in old and new European Union (EU) regions. Several contributions in this book suggest that a factor common to all backward regions, often neglected in the...

The focus of this chapter is on the microeconomic foundations of structural change and its spatially asymmetric impact on labour markets. EU economies are undergoing dramatic industrial restructuring due to a number of causes, such as the Eastward enlargement and economic integration of Central...

Convergence, both nominal and real, is occurring in the EU, especially for new members. Among the macroeconomic variables and correlations closely related to the convergence process are inflation, per capita GDP, the natural rate of unemployment and the inflation-unemployment relationship. This...

There are large regional disparities in labour market indicators in countries in Central Europe and the Baltic region. Such disparities appear to be persistent over time indicating, in part, a lack of flexibility in the prevailing adjustment mechanisms. Internal labour mobility is often seen as...

This paper studies the major determinants that affect the country location of university-educated Italian scientists and researchers who live abroad in three alternative geographic areas: the USA/Canada, the UK and other EU countries. In our sample, 38% of the brainy Italians are in other EU...

The regional distribution of labour productivity in Western Europe is characterised by a Core-Periphery spatial pattern: high (low) productivity regions are in a proximate relationship with other high (low) productivity regions. Over the period 1980 to 2003, intra-distribution dynamics has...

The aim of this paper is to throw some light on the institutional change, regional features, and growth and labour market performances in the eight transition countries that became EU members in May 2004 (8-CEECs). The consideration of a rather fine territorial disaggregation – at NUTS-3...

The female labour force participation rate (LFPR) displays a high degree of variation across regions. Our paper contributes to an understanding of regional determinants of female labour supply by looking at Austria’s 121 political districts. As predicted by theory, the aggregate wage level has...

With the beginning of economic reform in the formerly centrally planned economies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), open unemployment rapidly reached levels comparable to those in Western economies. Governments in the region reacted to this rise by adopting active labour market policies...

In this paper we approach the regional unemployment dynamics in Poland. Using policy relevant NUTS4 level data from 1999 to 2006, we employ tools typically applied to income convergence analyses to inquire the patterns of unemployment distribution. We demonstrate that the unemployment rate...