Documents regional level 231 results

"Inequality has long been a defining feature of the global economy, but by 2025, it has reached levels that demand urgent attention. The benefits of globalization and economic growth have flowed disproportionately to a small minority, while much of the world's population still face difficulties in achieving stable livelihoods. These divides are not inevitable. They are the outcome of political and institutional choices. This report draws on the World Inequality Database and new research to provide a comprehensive picture of inequality across income, wealth, gender, international finance, climate responsibility, taxation, and politics. The findings are clear: inequality remains extreme and persistent; it manifests across multiple dimensions that intersect and reinforce one another; and it reshapes democracies, fragmenting coalitions and eroding political consensus. Yet the data also demonstrate that inequality can be reduced. Policies such as redistributive transfers, progressive taxation, investment in human capital, and stronger labor rights have made a difference in some contexts. Proposals such as minimum wealth taxes on multi-millionaires illustrate the scale of resources that could be mobilized to finance education, health, and climate adaptation. Reducing inequality is not only about fairness but also essential for the resilience of economies, the stability of democracies, and the viability of our planet."

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"This study explores the structure and the dynamics of regional job and worker flows. The measures of job and worker flows are related to economic fluctuations, demographic factors and industry structure by employing the data of 85 Finnish regions over the period 1988–97. It is shown that labour market dynamics differ markedly between regions. As in previous analyses of linked employer–employee data, job and worker flows are shown to behave cyclically. In addition, the results indicate that observable differences in regional productivity, in-migration, demographics and industry structure help to explain the prevailing disparities in regional labour markets."

"Empirical studies of interregional mobility routinely use regional unemployment differentials to characterize economic incentives to move between regions. In this paper, we present a new regional labour market indicator computed from survey data in which respondents are asked to evaluate local employment opportunities in their resident municipality and surroundings. The subjective measures of satisfaction with local employment opportunities have positive and significant impact on interregional migration flows, also when controlling for traditional measures of regional labour market conditions, including the regional unemployment rate. Contrary to most European studies, we find that regional labour market conditions have a strong effect on interregional migration flows."

"Cet article analyse la nature et la portée des changements introduits par la mise en œuvre de la Stratégie européenne pour l'emploi dans les politiques de l'emploi en Wallonie et en France. Ces changements affectent peu les institutions et les systèmes d'acteurs mais concernent de façon déterminante les instruments d'action publique. Les rapports de pouvoir et de compétition entre institutions nationales restent déterminants de la forme des transformations apportées à ces instruments. Les auteurs tendent notamment à souligner que les modifications incrémentales apportées à l'instrumentation et au système d'acteurs finissent par transformer sur le fond le sens de ces politiques publiques. Les principes d'activation, de territorialisation, d'individualisation, de contrôle paraissent émerger de façon symétrique dans les deux espaces étudiés. Les auteurs soulignent aussi qu'en dépit d'une faible capacité régulatrice en ce domaine, les recommandations de l'Union européenne produisent au final des inflexions importantes dans les politiques nationales."

"Stochastic production frontiers are used for estimating regional matching functions where unemployment outflow is 'produced' by the unemployed and vacancies. The frontier is estimated using regional panel data from Finland from 1988 to 1997 and the Battese and Coelli frontier model, where the explanatory factors are included in the inefficiency term. The stochastic frontier matching function has constant returns, whereas in OLS estimation with fixed effects the returns are slightly increasing. Unemployment and vacancies in neighbouring regions have a spillover effect on efficiency. Excess job reallocation in a region deteriorates matching efficiency. The decomposition of total factor productivity change in matching to efficiency change and change in matching technology is also investigated by interpreting the matching frontier as a distance function and using Malmquist indexes. There is a downward trend in the technology, but short-term variations are dominated by cyclical changes in efficiency."

"L'année 2004 a été celle d'un élargissement de l'UE à dix nouveaux pays dont huit d'Europe centrale et orientale (PECO). S'ils ont augmenté sa population de 20 %, les nouveaux entrants n'ont cependant contribué au PIB de l'UE qu'à hauteur de 5 %. Alors que ses perspectives financières et sa politique de cohésion doivent être redéfinies pour la période 2007-2013, l'UE se trouve aujourd'hui confrontée à un difficile problème : il lui faut tenter de maintenir son budget à un niveau assez bas pour satisfaire les principaux contributeurs nets tout en réduisant les disparités existantes afin de stimuler la croissance dans une Union élargie à des pays au faible PIB par habitant. L'étude réalisée met en évidence la persistance de fortes disparités régionales dans les PECO et ce, malgré l'attribution d'aides de transition et de préadhésion. Les PECO, pays en rattrapage, enregistrent un taux de croissance important mais connaissent simultanément un creusement de leurs disparités régionales dans la mesure où leur dynamisme tend notamment à être tiré par des effets de pôles de croissance apparaissant dans les capitales. Cette efficacité limitée des fonds européens pose la question de leur réforme tant dans le sens de leur augmentation pour les PECO, afin de les rendre comparables aux efforts financiers consentis par le passé à d'autres pays de l'UE, que dans celui de leur concentration pour éviter leur saupoudrage."

"In this article, we review recent developments in the extensive literature on territorially embedded production systems in the developed world, with a particular eye towards changes that have (or have not) occurred over the last decade. Improvements in transportation and communication technologies and the advent of global production networks have put newly into play the degree to which industrial communities must be located in specific and discretely bounded territories. What had been a relatively territorially circumscribed, and thus fundamentally organizational, fragmentation of production has acquired a more pronounced spatial dimension in recent years. This has raised new questions for regional economic governance that require new study of links not only within regions and sectors, but also between them. In particular, there is a need to understand whether and how local sources of competitive advantage can be transposed to include global dimensions."