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...

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...

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 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...

Most evaluation studies of active labour market policies (ALMP) focus on the micro-econometric evaluation approach using individual data. However, as the microeconometric approach usually ignores impacts on the non-participants, it should be seen as a first step to a complete evaluation which...

This paper considers findings from a panel of Croatian and Slovenian firms throughout the period 1995–2000. Scrutiny of Croatia and Slovenia sheds light on regional issues, owing to their small size and their being part of the same country until the early 1990s. More particularly, the issues...

This paper investigates the extent to which the patterns of regional unemployment in Poland since the early 1990s can be explained by regional imbalances in the supply and demand for skilled labour. Indeed, massive changes in the relative demand for skilled labour are found to have taken place...