Structural economic change,labour market segmentation and interregional migration

In the 1970s there were marked changes in internal migration in Australia, with the major metropolitan areas experiencing,for the first time, significant losses in their migration interchanges with other areas. Simultaneously, country regions recorded substantial reductions in their formerly high rates of net outmigration. This paper argues that these migration changes were largely a response to the changing location and structure of labour demand: the high degree of labour market segmentation in Australia, and changes in the industrial structure of employment, together provide an explanation for contrasts in the migration responses of different demographic groups.     

Dynamic modeling of interregional economic activity: An application to the Spanish labour market

This paper focuses on the dynamic relations between Spain's principal regional labor markets. An economic base mechanism, some of whose assumptions are redefined, is postulated as the essential behavior hypothesis. The bifurcation hypothesis is resolved having regard to the necessary condition of cointegration between the basic sector and the regional aggregate, using series with quarterly periodicity in this case. The identified bases, which need not coincide in each region, allow a dynamic inter-regional model to be built using vector autoregression with an error correction mechanism. The results are a step towards the spatial disaggregation of Spain's labor market and reveal singular dynamic relationships.     

Social security benefits and interregional income inequalities

In affluent mixed economies, social security programs are often the single most effective instrument to reach a minimal level of interregional income inequality. This paper extensively investigates the spatial structure and the interregional impacts of these programs in The Netherlands, using a mixture of decomposition techniques, factor analysis and cluster analysis.The authors thank Professor Flip de Kam for his appreciated support and helpful advice.     

Foreign exports,net interregional spillovers and Chinese regional supply chains

This study develops a method to decompose total national indirect value added effects (induced by final demand) into intraregional effects and interregional spillovers. The decomposition is applied to China's 2002 and 2007 interregional input–output tables with foreign‐owned processing exports separated from normal exports. First, we find that interregional spillovers account for one quarter to one half of the total national indirect value added multipliers in 2007, with the largest spillovers occurring for the coastal regions. This finding is important when explaining regional value added generation and thus has real implications for regional policy programmes. Second, we develop a new measure, namely, ‘net interregional value added spillovers’ to position China's individual regions in the global production chains. This measure shows that upstream regions in the Centre, Northwest and Southwest of China are net recipients of interregional value added spillovers generated by foreign exports in coastal regions. Over time, this observation becomes more pronounced.     

A multiregional labour supply model for Austria: The effects of different regionalisations in multiregional labour market modelling

The design of a spatial framework in multi-and interregional modelling is a crucial element of the research process. In this paper an attempt is made to present some empirical evidence with respect to two hypotheses, the scale hyothesis and the aggregation hypothesis. This will be achieved by estimating the parameters and testing the performance of a multiregional labour supply model for Austria. Five regionalisation approaches are specified for delineating (functional) labour market regions. The paper shows that it is by no means admissible to ignore possible effects of the spatial representation choice. The fundamental question of which regionalisation should be chosen should be decided on the basis of relevant evaluation criteria.     

Social capital and immigrants' labour market performance

This paper analyses the role of social capital on immigrants' labour market outcomes. We use principal component analysis (PCA) to build an index of social networks and explore its impact on the probability of getting a job and on wage levels using the Households Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) longitudinal survey data (2002–2010). We find a positive effect of social capital on migrants' employment outcomes and wages, especially for women. Distinguishing employment into blue and white‐collar jobs, we find that social capital only affects the probability of getting a white‐collar job. These results suggest that promoting opportunities to create social capital has a beneficial effect on migrants' integration in the host country.     

Modelling regional labour market dynamics in space and time

This paper extends the seminal Blanchard and Katz regional labour market model to include interaction effects using a dynamic spatial panel data approach. Three key contributions of this extended model are: (i) the unrealistic assumption that regions are independent of one another no longer has to be made, (ii) the magnitude and significance of so‐called spillover effects can be empirically assessed, and (iii) both the temporal and spatial propagation of labour demand shocks can be investigated. Using annual data from 1986–2010 for 112 regions across eight EU countries, both the non‐spatial and spatial models are estimated. It is found that the majority of the spillover effects are highly significant. Consistent with economic theory, the impact of a region‐specific demand shock is largest in the region where the shock instigates. The shock also propagates to other regions, especially impacting the first and second‐order neighbours.     

Partial equilibrium theory of interregional trade and the gravity model

Gravity models of the constrained, unconstrained and elastically constrained type are interpreted as reduced forms of spatial price equilibria of interregional trade. The explicit forms of equilibrium models reducing to the different varieties of gravity models are presented. They are theoretically consistent in the sense that the underlying demand and supply functions are compatible with individual optimising behaviour. Forms other than the gravity type, however, are consistent as well. No choice can be made by mere theoretical arguments. But additional criteria like computational facility and factual conformity provide good reasons for preferring gravity forms in applied work.     

An innovative land use regression model incorporating meteorology for exposure analysis

The advent of spatial analysis and geographic information systems (GIS) has led to studies of chronic exposure and health effects based on the rationale that intra-urban variations in ambient air pollution concentrations are as great as inter-urban differences. Such studies typically rely on local spatial covariates (e.g., traffic, land use type) derived from circular areas (buffers) to predict concentrations/exposures at receptor sites, as a means of averaging the annual net effect of meteorological influences (i.e., wind speed, wind direction and insolation). This is the approach taken in the now popular land use regression (LUR) method. However spatial studies of chronic exposures and temporal studies of acute exposures have not been adequately integrated. This paper presents an innovative LUR method implemented in a GIS environment that reflects both temporal and spatial variability and considers the role of meteorology. The new source area LUR integrates wind speed, wind direction and cloud cover/insolation to estimate hourly nitric oxide (NO) and nitrogen dioxide (NO(2)) concentrations from land use types (i.e., road network, commercial land use) and these concentrations are then used as covariates to regress against NO and NO(2) measurements at various receptor sites across the Vancouver region and compared directly with estimates from a regular LUR. The results show that, when variability in seasonal concentration measurements is present, the source area LUR or SA-LUR model is a better option for concentration estimation.     

Innovation and regional absorptive capacity: the labour market dimension

In 2003, Eurostat published an ‘experimental’ dataset on regional innovation levels derived from the Second Community Innovation Survey. This dataset, part of the European Innovation Scoreboard, also contains a range of regional labour market indicators. In this paper, we report an exploratory analysis of this data, focussing on how the labour market characteristics of regions shape regions’ absorptive capacity (RACAP) and their ability to assimilate knowledge from public and externally conducted R&D. In particular, we aim to establish whether labour market aspects of RACAP are more important for innovation in prosperous or lagging regions of the European Union (EU).

Repayment risk and European home owners: the interplay of housing markets,labour markets,financial markets and social security systems

Across Europe mass home ownership has been based on financial arrangements that have provided individual buyers with loans that can be repaid over long periods of time. These arrangements vary in their detail, and their integrity is subject to the risk of default. This paper focuses on the probability of households in different European countries experiencing repayment difficulties, and seeks to identify some of the macro factors that lead to this happening. It shows that national levels of repayment risk can be attributed to the nature of labour markets, social security systems, housing markets and financial markets.     

Ethnic minority unemployment and local labour market conditions in Great Britain

"The authors use the 2% Individual Sample of Anonymised Records (SAR) in conjunction with area-based census data for pseudo travel-to-work areas, to explore the relative importance of individual characteristics and area characteristics on ethnic minority unemployment rates [in Great Britain].... The most important differences in the propensity to unemployment are shown to be between individuals, and, compared with whites, ethnic minority groups are shown to be disadvantaged wherever they live.... In all, it is argued that at the spatial scale which is identifiable in the Individual SAR, ethnic minority unemployment cannot be attributed to geographical distribution, though data at a finer geographical scale are needed to test this hypothesis more fully."