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...

In the 1990s the socio-economic disparities existing among the European regions, were significantly greater than those among countries, show persistent differences, and also a dynamic whereby periods of slow convergence alternate with others in which the tendency is towards divergence. We deal...

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...

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,...

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...

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...