Convergence and asymmetries in the dynamics of employment: the case of the European regions

The aim of this paper – which starts by examining the links between regional disparities, labour market problems and the European integration process – is to compare the behaviour over the last two decades of employment in the European regions. Up to 81 regions were considered and they were obtained as partitions of the five biggest countries of Europe. In comparison with traditional analysis, a major distinction is that regional disparities are examined in terms of labour market indicators (rather than income or productivity); a second difference is that I prefer to focus on employment rather than on unemployment. This research confirms that, in several European countries, the employment rates have been slowly decreasing. Also, this paper shows that a  dispersion index in regional employment varies over countries and is growing almost everywhere; instead, a -type convergence has been detected only in some cases. Finally, by extending Lilien’s theory of sectoral shifts to a regional context, employment growth is related to a number of dispersion indices.