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...

Italy has an immobile social structure. At the heart of this immobility is the educational system, with its high direct, but especially indirect cost, due to the extremely long time necessary to get a degree and to complete the subsequent school-to-work transition. Such cost prevents the...

Purpose – This purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue on vulnerability and discrimination among women, children and ethnic minorities. Design/methodology/approach – The paper discusses the articles in the special issue which employ a variety of individual-level data, some of...

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 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 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...