Suchergebnisse

There isn't really such a thing as regional labour market policy in the Netherlands: legislation and regulation on labour are applied nationwide. Examples include minimum wage laws, flexibilisation of the labour market and self-employment, or legislation arising from pension agreements and collective bargaining agreements. Various ministerial departments and bodies such as the Association of Netherlands Municipalities endeavour to translate national policy to the regional level, while the Employee Insurance Agency and Foundation for Cooperation on Vocational Education, Training and Labour Market maintain overviews of the available labour market information at the regional level.

We test whether functional regions in the Netherlands show more labour market coherence between the municipalities included in them than the Dutch administrative regions. It turns out that regional disparities are not significantly smaller within functional than within administrative regions with respect to income level, housing prices, employment rate and unemployment rate. We argue that the numerous functional delimitations of the labour market that have been made for many countries in other studies are only useful for policy making if they clearly outperform the administrative delimitations with respect to some relevant indicators of labour market coherence or regional disparities.

Abstract
Significant regional inequalities of income and wealth exist in every Western European country and in North America, but their extent varies from country to country. In both Europe and the US, it is generally thought that they tended to narrow from the early 1900s until about 1980, since when they have widened. This widening has become associated with the rise of populism, while the Covid-19 crisis has thrown regional disadvantage into sharp relief. This article discusses measurement issues, traces developments over time, and explores the social and economic consequences of regional disparities. It describes the evolution of regional policy, and in particular the move to more localized approaches in Europe, analysing their strengths and weaknesses.

Using a representative longitudinal survey of U.S. teenagers, we investigate how peer racial composition in high school affects individual turnout of young adults. We exploit across-cohort, within-school differences in peer racial composition. One within-school standard deviation increase in the racial diversity index leads to a 2.2 percent increase in the probability of being registered to vote seven years later and to a 2.6 percent higher probability of voting six years later. These effects are likely due to positive interracial contact when socialization has long-lasting effects: higher racial diversity in school is linked to more interracial friendships in school and later on.

This study investigates the extent and speed of dynamic adjustment of labour supply to changes in labour demand, government policies and autonomous trends. We estimate error-correction models (ECMs) for male and female participation rates in the Netherlands between 1969 and 2004. The results show significant short and long-run effects of labour demand as well as a negative autonomous trend for male participation. In contrast, we find no significant long-run labour-demand effects and a very strong positive autonomous trend for female participation. Including female and male participation as additional explanatory variables in the male and female ECMs, respectively, reveals significant substitution effects between female and male participation. For male participation the substitution effects from female participation account for the negative trend in the basic ECM, while for female participation the substitution effects from male participation counterbalance labour demand effects that are now significant. In addition, we find very significant breakpoints in male and female participation at 1994, which indicate the effects of exogenous participation-promoting policies by the Dutch governments after 1994. The adjustments of the participation rates to changes in labour demand, government policies and autonomous trends are moderately fast.