Abstract
Business cycles in wealthier countries reflected a continuous transformation of spatial organizations of both countries and regions, possibly strengthening social inequalities and polarization in more and less productive areas. Local job markets are particularly sensitive to changes in both settlement forms and socioeconomic functions, being in turn dependent on more intense regional divides and product dynamics. More specifically, economic downturns were assumed to influence regional spatial structures. To validate this hypothesis, we investigated (i) spatial regime and (ii) short-term changes of both activity rate and unemployment rate (taken as proxies of local job market functioning) in 686 homogeneous districts of Italy over three periods: (i) employment growth reflecting moderate income expansion (2004–2007); (ii) early crisis' stage with a modest increase of unemployment (2007–2010); and (iii) late crisis' stage with marked increase of unemployment (2010–2013). The empirical analysis identified the socioeconomic factors that characterize job market dynamics more effectively. Results pointed out that the 2007 recession corresponded with decreased spatial polarizations in unemployment rate, resulting in a deepening of the traditional gap between affluent northern regions and disadvantaged southern areas.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Aiello F., Scoppa V. (2005). Convergence and regional productivity divide in Italy: Evidence from panel data (pp. 17343). MPRA.
Anselin, L. (1995). Local indicators of spatial association–LISA. Geographical Analysis, 27, 93–115.
Arribas-Bel, D., & Sanz-Gracia, F. (2014). The validity of the monocentric city model in a polycentric age: US metropolitan areas in 1990, 2000 and 2010. Urban Geography, 35, 980–997.
Bagnasco, A. (1977). Tre Italie: La problematica territoriale dello sviluppo italiano [The three Italies: The local problem of Italian development]. Il Mulino.
Bajocco, S., Ceccarelli, T., Smiraglia, D., Salvati, L., & Ricotta, C. (2016). Modeling the ecological niche of long-term land use changes: The role of biophysical factors. Ecological Indicators, 60, 231–236.
Bande, R., & Karanassou, M. (2013). The natural rate of unemployment hypothesis and the evolution of regional disparities in Spanish unemployment. Urban Studies, 50(10), 2044–2062.
Barca, F. (2009). An agenda for a reformed cohesion policy. A place-based approach to meeting European Union challenges and expectations. Brussels: EU Commission for Regional Policy.
Barro, R. J., & Sala-I-Martin, X. (1991). Convergence across states and regions. Brookings Paper on Economic Activity, 1, 107–158.
Barro, R., & Sala-i-Martin, X. (1995). Economic growth. Mc Graw-Hill.
Bathelt, H., & Boggs, J. S. (2003). Toward a reconceptualization of regional development paths: Is Leipzig’s media cluster a continuation of or a rupture with the past? Economic Geography, 79(3), 265–293.
Battaglia, M., & Iraldo, F. (2011). Spatial effects of labour policies promoted in Italy from 1996 to 2006: An analysis in the EU context. European Planning Studies, 19(2), 311–330.
Becattini, G. (1990). The Marshallian industrial district as a socio-economic notion. In F. Pyke, G. Becattini, & W. Sengenberger (Eds.), Industrial districts and inter-firm co-operation in Italy (pp. 52–74). International Institute for Labour Studies.
Belussi, F., & Gottardi, G. (2000). Evolutionary patterns of local industrial systems. Ashgate.
Boeri, T., & Jimeno, J. F. (2016). Learning from the great divergence in unemployment in Europe during the crisis. Labour Economics, 41, 32–46.
Bonavero, P., Dematteis, G., & Sforzi, F. (1999). The Italian urban system. Towards European integration. Ashgate.
Boschma, R., & Iammarino, S. (2009). Related variety, trade linkages, and regional growth in Italy. Economic Geography, 85(3), 289–311.
Budd, L., & Sancino, A. (2016). A framework for city leadership in multilevel governance settings: The comparative contexts of Italy and the UK. Regional Studies, Regional Science, 3(1), 129–145.
Cainelli, G., & Iacobucci, D. (2012). Agglomeration, related variety, and vertical integration. Economic Geography, 88(3), 255–277.
Camagni, R., Capello, R., Caragliu, A. (2017). Static vs. dynamic agglomeration economies: Spatial context and structural evolution behind urban growth. In Seminal studies in regional and urban economics (pp. 227–259). Springer, Cham.
Capello, R. (2000). The city network paradigm: Measuring urban network externalities. Urban Studies, 37, 1925–1945.
Carlucci, M., Chelli, F. M., & Salvati, L. (2018). Toward a new cycle: Short-term population dynamics, gentrification, and re-urbanization of Milan (Italy). Sustainability, 10(9), 3014.
Castagnetti, C., Chelli, F., & Rosti, L. (2005). Educational performance as signalling device: Evidence from Italy. Economics Bulletin, 9(4), 1–7.
Cecchini, M., Zambon, I., Pontrandolfi, A., Turco, R., Colantoni, A., Mavrakis, A., & Salvati, L. (2019). Urban sprawl and the ‘olive’ landscape: Sustainable land management for ‘crisis’ cities. GeoJournal, 84(1), 237–255.
Chelleri, L., Schuetze, T., & Salvati, L. (2015). Integrating resilience with urban sustainability in neglected neighborhoods: Challenges and opportunities of transitioning to decentralized water management in Mexico City. Habitat International, 48, 122–130.
Chelli, F. M., Ciommi, M., Emili, A., Gigliarano, C., & Taralli, S. (2016). Assessing the equitable and sustainable well-being of the Italian provinces. International Journal of Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-Based Systems, 24(S1), 39–62.
Christaller, W. (1933). Die zentralen Orte in Suddeutschland. Gustav Fischer Verlag.
Ciccone, A. (2002). Agglomeration effects in Europe. European Economic Review, 46(2), 213–227.
Ciommi, M., Chelli, F. M., Carlucci, M., & Salvati, L. (2018). Urban growth and demographic dynamics in southern Europe: Toward a new statistical approach to regional science. Sustainability, 10(8), 2765.
Ciommi, M., Chelli, F. M., & Salvati, L. (2019). Integrating parametric and non-parametric multivariate analysis of urban growth and commuting patterns in a European metropolitan area. Quality & Quantity, 53(2), 957–979.
Cliff, A., & Ord, J. K. (1981). Spatial Processes, Models and Applications. Pion.
Coombes, M., & Bond, S. (2008). Travel-to-Work Areas: The 2007 review. Office for National Statistics.
Cracolici, M. F., Cuffaro, M., & Nijkamp, P. (2007). Geographical distribution of unemployment: An analysis of provincial differences in Italy. Growth and Change, 38(4), 649–670.
Dallara, A., & Rizzi, P. (2012). Geographic map of sustainability in Italian local systems. Regional Studies, 46(3), 321–337.
Daniele, V., Malanima, P. (2007). Il prodotto delle regioni e il divario Nord-Sud in Italia (1861–2004) [Regional product and the North-South divide in Italy]. Rivista di Politica Economica, March-April, pp. 267–315.
Del Campo, C., Monteiro, C. M. F., & Oliveira Soares, J. O. (2008). The European regional policy and the socio-economic diversity of European regions: A multivariate analysis. European Journal of Operational Research, 187, 600–612.
Delfanti, L., Colantoni, A., Recanatesi, F., Bencardino, M., Sateriano, A., Zambon, I., & Salvati, L. (2016). Solar plants, environmental degradation and local socioeconomic contexts: A case study in a Mediterranean country. Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 61, 88–93.
Di Consiglio, L., Solari, F. (2017). Weighting and estimation methods. In: The Handbook on Methodology of Modern Business Statistics. Bruxelles: European Commission.
Di Feliciantonio, C., Salvati, L., Sarantakou, E., & Rontos, K. (2018). Class diversification, economic growth and urban sprawl: Evidences from a pre-crisis European city. Quality & Quantity, 52(4), 1501–1522.
Dijkstra, L., Garcilazo, E., & McCann, P. (2013). The economic performance of European cities and city regions: Myths and realities. European Planning Studies, 21, 334–354.
Dow, S., Mantagnoli, A., & Napolitano, O. (2012). Interest rates and convergence across Italian regions. Regional Studies, 46, 893–905.
Dunford, M. (2002). Italian regional evolution. Environment and Planning A, 34, 657–694.
Dunford, M. (2008). After the three Italies the (internally differentiated) North-South divide: Analysing regional and industrial trajectories. Annales De Géographie, 6(664), 85–114.
Duranton, G., Martin, P., Mayer, T., & Mayneris, F. (2010). The Economics of Clusters: Lessons from the French Experience. Oxford University Press.
Elder, S., Schmidt, D. (2004). Global employment trends for women. Employment Analysis Unit, Employment Strategy Department, International Labour Office.
Economic Commission (2020). Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the regions. A European strategy for data. European Commission.
Faini, R., Galli, G., Gennari, P., & Rossi, F. (1997). An empirical puzzle: Falling migration and growing unemployment differential among Italian regions. European Economic Review, 41(3–5), 571–579.
Franconi, L., Ichim, D., & D’Aló, M. (2017). Labour Market Areas for territorial policies: Tools for a European approach. Statistical Journal of the IAOS, 33(3), 585–591.
Fratianni, M., & Marchionne, F. (2012). Trade costs and economic development. Economic Geography, 88(2), 137–163.
Frenken, K., Van Oort, F., & Verburg, T. (2007). Related variety, unrelated variety, and regional economic growth. Regional Studies, 41, 685–697.
Garcia, M. (2010). The breakdown of the Spanish urban growth model: Social and territorial effects of the global crisis. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 34(4), 967–980.
Gavalas, V. S., Rontos, K., & Salvati, L. (2014). Who becomes an unwed mother in Greece? Sociodemographic and geographical aspects of an emerging phenomenon. Population, Space and Place, 20(3), 250–263.
Gigliarano, C., & Chelli, F. M. (2016). Measuring inter-temporal intragenerational mobility: An application to the Italian labour market. Quality & Quantity, 50(1), 89–102.
Giusti, A., & Grassini, L. (2007). Local labour systems and agricultural activities: The case of Tuscany. International Advances in Economic Research, 13, 475–487.
Glaeser, E. L., Giacomo, A. M., & Tobio, K. (2014). Cities, skills and regional change. Regional Studies, 48, 7–43.
Glaeser, E. L., Kallal, H. D., Schinkmann, J. A., & Shleifer, A. (1992). Growth in cities. Journal of Political Economy, 100, 1126–1152.
Gonzalez, S. (2011). The North South divide in Italy and England: Discursive construction of regional inequality. European Urban and Regional Studies, 18(1), 62–76.
Guillain, R., Le Gallo, J., & Boiteux-Orain, C. (2006). Changes in spatial and sectoral patterns of employment in Ile-de-France, 1978–97. Urban Studies, 43(11), 2075–2098.
Haggett, P. (2001). Geography: A global synthesis. Pearson Hall.
Henderson, J. V., Kuncoro, A., & Turner, M. (1995). Industrial development in cities. Journal of Political Economy, 103, 1067–1085.
Iammarino, S., Jona-Lasinio, C., Mantegazza, S. (2004). Labour productivity, ICT and regions. The revival of Italian “dualism”? SPRU Electronic Working Paper Series, 127.
Ichim, D., Franconi, L., D’Aló, M., Van den Heuvel, G. (2017). Package LabourMarketAreas v. 3.0: Identification, Tuning, Visualisation and Analysis of Labour Market Areas. Available from: https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=LabourMarketAreas.
Istat (2006). Atlante statistico dei comuni. Rome, Istituto Nazionale di Statistica.
Istat (2015). La nuova geografia dei sistemi locali. Rome, Istat.
Kemeny, T., & Storper, M. (2014). Is specialisation good for regional economic development? Regional Studies, 49(6), 1003–1018.
Kordos, J. (2016). Development of Small area Estimation in Official Statistics. Statistics in Transition, New Series, 17(1), 105–132.
Lamonica, G. R., Recchioni, M. C., Chelli, F. M., & Salvati, L. (2020). The efficiency of the cross-entropy method when estimating the technical coefficients of input–output tables. Spatial Economic Analysis, 15(1), 62–91.
Magrini, S., Gerolimetto, M., & Duran, H. E. (2015). Regional convergence and aggregate business cycle in the United States. Regional Studies, 49(2), 251–272.
Marchetti, S., Giusti, C., Pratesi, M., Salvati, N., Giannotti, F., Pedreschi, D., Rinzivillo, S., Pappalardo, L., & Gabrielli, L. (2015). Small area model-based estimators using big data sources. Journal of Official Statistics, 31(2), 263–281.
Marhuenda, Y., Molina, I., & Morales, D. (2013). Small area estimation with spatio-temporal Fay-Herriot models. Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, 58, 308–325.
Massari, R., Pittau, M. G., & Zelli, R. (2009). A dwindling middle class? Italian evidence in the 2000s. Journal of Economic Inequality, 7(4), 333–350.
Mauro, L. (2004). The macroeconomics of Italy: A regional perspective. Journal of Policy Modelling, 26(8–9), 927–944.
Molina, I., Nandram, B., & Rao, J. N. K. (2014). Small area estimation of general parameters with application to poverty indicators: A hierarchical Bayes approach. The Annals of Applied Statistics, 8(2), 852–885.
Patacchini, E. (2008). Local analysis of economic disparities in Italy: A spatial statistics approach. Statistical Methods and Applications, 17, 85–112.
Patacchini, E., & Zenou, Y. (2007). Spatial Dependence in Local Unemployment Rates. Journal of Economic Geography, 7, 169–191.
Pellegrini, G. (2002). Proximity, Polarization and Local Labour Market Performances. Network and Spatial Economics, 2, 151–174.
Pérez, J. M. G. (2010). The real estate and economic crisis: An opportunity for urban return and rehabilitation policies in Spain. Sustainability, 2(6), 1571–1601.
Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the 21st century. Harvard University Press.
Recanatesi, F., Clemente, M., Grigoriadis, E., Ranalli, F., Zitti, M., & Salvati, L. (2016). A fifty-year sustainability assessment of Italian agro-forest districts. Sustainability, 8(1), 32.
Ren, X. (2015). City power and urban fiscal crises: The USA, China, and India. International Journal of Urban Science, 19(1), 73–81.
Riguelle, F., Thomas, I., & Verhetsel, A. (2007). Measuring Urban Polycentrism: A European Case Study and its Implications. Journal of Economic Geography, 7, 193–215.
Rodríguez-Pose, A. (2012). Trade and regional inequality. Economic Geography, 88(2), 109–136.
Rodríguez-Pose, A. (2013). Do institutions matter for regional development? Regional Studies, 47, 1034–1047.
Rosti, L., & Chelli, F. (2005). Gender discrimination, entrepreneurial talent and self-employment. Small Business Economics, 24(2), 131–142.
Salvati, L. (2014). Towards a polycentric region? The socio-economic trajectory of Rome, an ‘eternally mediterranean’ city. Tijdschrift Voor Economische En Sociale Geografie, 105(3), 268–284.
Salvati, L. (2016). The dark side of the crisis: Disparities in per capita income (2000–12) and the urban-rural gradient in Greece. Tijdschrift Voor Economische En Sociale Geografie, 107(5), 628–641.
Salvati, L., Carlucci, M., & Venanzoni, G. (2017). Recession, resilience, local labour markets: Wealthier is better? Letters in Spatial and Resource Sciences, 10(2), 177–204.
Salvati, L., Ciommi, M. T., Serra, P., & Chelli, F. M. (2019). Exploring the spatial structure of housing prices under economic expansion and stagnation: The role of socio-demographic factors in metropolitan Rome, Italy. Land Use Policy, 81, 143–152.
Salvati, L., & Serra, P. (2016). Estimating rapidity of change in complex urban systems: A multidimensional, local-scale approach. Geographical Analysis, 48(2), 132–156.
Salvati, L., & Zitti, M. (2007). Territorial disparities, natural resource distribution, and land degradation: A case study in southern Europe. GeoJournal, 70(2), 185–194.
Salvati, L., & Zitti, M. (2009). Substitutability and weighting of ecological and economic indicators: Exploring the importance of various components of a synthetic index. Ecological Economics, 68(4), 1093–1099.
Salvati, L., Zitti, M., & Sateriano, A. (2013). Changes in city vertical profile as an indicator of sprawl: Evidence from a Mediterranean urban region. Habitat International, 38, 119–125.
Schneider, F., Kallis, G., & Martinez-Alier, J. (2010). Crisis or opportunity? Economic degrowth for social equity and ecological sustainability. Introduction to this special issue. Journal of Cleaner Production, 18(6), 511–518.
Scott, A. J. (1988). Flexible production systems and regional development, the rise of industrial spaces in North America and Western Europe. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 12, 171–186.
Smart, M. (1974). Labour market areas: Uses and definitions. Progress in Planning, 2, 239–353.
Soares, J. O., Marques, M. L., & Monteiro, C. F. (2003). A multivariate methodology to uncover regional disparities: A contribution to improve European Union and governmental decisions. European Journal of Operational Research, 145, 121–135.
Storper, M. (1997). The regional world. Territorial development in a global economy. Guilford Press.
Storper, M. (2011). Why do regions develop and change? The challenge for geography and economics. Journal of Economic Geography, 11, 333–346.
Struijs, P., Braaksma, B., & Daas, P. J. (2014). Official statistics and big data. Big Data & Society, 1(1), 2053951714538417.
Tridico, P. (2015). From economic decline to the current crisis in Italy. International Review of Applied Economics, 29(2), 164–193.
UNECE (2018). Recommendations for Promoting, Measuring and Communicating the Value of Official Statistics. New York, United Nations.
Veneri, P. (2010). Urban polycentricity and the costs of commuting: Evidence from Italian metropolitan areas. Growth and Change, 41(3), 403–429.
Whelan, C. T., Nolan, B., & Maitre, B. (2017). Polarization or “Squeezed Middle” in the great recession? A comparative European analysis of the distribution of economic stress. Social Indicators Research, 133(1), 163–184.
Wilkinson, R., & Pickett, K. (2009). The spirit level: Why equality is better for everyone. Penguin Books.
Wulfgramm, M. (2014). Life satisfaction effects of unemployment in Europe: The moderating influence of labour market policy. Journal of European Social Policy, 24(3), 258–272.
Zambon, I., Colantoni, A., Carlucci, M., Morrow, N., Sateriano, A., & Salvati, L. (2017). Land quality, sustainable development and environmental degradation in agricultural districts: A computational approach based on entropy indexes. Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 64, 37–46.
Acknowledgements
Authors did not received any fund for covering the costs to publish in open access.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
Authors contributed equally to the manuscript.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Human or animal partcipants
Research did not involved Human Participants and/or Animal.
Informed consent
Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Ciaschini, C., Salvati, L. Enlarging spatial divides in local job markets? Insights from Italy, 2004–2013. GeoJournal 87, 5087–5100 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-021-10558-4
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-021-10558-4