Abstract
The aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between the accessibility of public employment services (PES) offices and unemployment rates in large urban areas of Spain. In total, there are 85 large urban areas in Spain encompassing 747 municipalities or 9.2% of all Spanish municipalities; 21 of these large urban areas are composed of just one municipality each, while the remaining 64 large urban areas are composed of two or more municipalities. The accessibility of public employment service offices in large urban areas is studied using a measure that considers competition as well as the number of offices and the size of their catchment areas. The results of our analysis support the existence of spatial spillovers in urban labor markets; consequently, the model must include this spatial process explicitly, and the results must be interpreted accordingly. Concerning the relationship between accessibility and the urban unemployment rate, we find significant and negative indirect and total effects, yet the direct effect is not found to be statistically significant.
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Notes
- 1.
Services addressed to employed people and employers are also to be provided at PES offices.
- 2.
The tests follow a chi-squared distribution with K degrees of freedom.
- 3.
For estimation and testing purpose, we use a distance-based spatial weight matrix, where the distance cut-off is 150 km.
- 4.
These arise because any municipality is a neighbor of its neighbors, so changes that impact municipality i will also impact its neighboring municipalities, which will in turn have higher-order feedback effects upon municipality i.
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Funding from the Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness (Spain) ECO2016-75805-R and ECO2017-86402-C2-1-R is gratefully acknowledged.
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Suárez, P., Mayor, M., Cueto, B. (2020). Accessibility of Public Employment Services Within Large Urban Areas: A Spatial Approach. In: Thill, JC. (eds) Innovations in Urban and Regional Systems. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43694-0_4
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