تنظیم بازار کار منطقه ای برای شوک های ساختاری:مقایسه بین المللی

Previous research indicates that local industry composition significantly influences unemployment in the American Rust Belt. This paper uses a dual market model to compare evolutions of structural joblessness in German regions with those of a Rust Belt area in the United States. Results indicate that German labor markets exhibit both intriguing similarities and differences to the US benchmark case. In particular, the contrasts between the two areas highlight the less distinct labor supply flexibility of Western European labor markets as demonstrated by unemployment responses to changes in regional employment prospects.

Differences in local rates of unemployment have long been noted in the United States and Western Europe (e.g., Hall, 1970 and McCormick and Sheppard, 1992), but consistent explanations have been elusive (Summers, 1990). Seminal findings in sectoral wage and employment studies suggest a cohesive basis for understanding related local unemployment issues. Inter-industry wage differential research shows that similar workers earn significantly different wages based on their industry affiliation (Dickens & Katz, 1987; Katz & Summers, 1989). These differences indicate that systematic incentives exist for “wait” unemployment, where workers queue for jobs in high-wage industries. Is it therefore possible that decreased employment in high-wage sectors may reduce long-term unemployment rates in a region? Previous research has found that the sectoral composition of regional employment, or “industrial structure,” strongly influences local jobless queues in the American Rust Belt (Weiler, 2000 and Weiler, 2001), leading to potentially stubborn structural unemployment based on the types of local jobs. Most of such unemployment comes from less-skilled workers queuing for more attractive positions available at their skill level (Topel, 1993). A simple bifurcation of the labor market into high-wage primary and lower-wage secondary employment sheds considerable light on short- and longer-term unemployment patterns by highlighting jobless queues for more attractive primary jobs. The current paper extends the noted previous results from such a restructuring area in the United States to the local labor markets in western Germany to further explore the impact of industrial structure on unemployment. The results from time series of regional cross-sections corroborate previous findings that labor supply flexibility in particular appears to be less pronounced in the European context. This greater inflexibility may help explain the longer-term problems with European structural unemployment, as less mobile jobless workers adjust more slowly to changing labor market prospects. The findings from both countries indicate that a simple segmented labor market perspective, which proxies for a region's industrial structure through high- and low-wage industries, can yield insights into regional joblessness based on queues for higher-wage positions.

This paper's remarkably simple dualistic perspective can yield significant insights into regional joblessness on both sides of the Atlantic. In West Virginia, the short-run impact of structural shocks indicates that primary share contractions increase local unemployment queues. However, areas with decreasing concentrations of high-wage industry employment have decreasing unemployment rates over time as mobile workers move away from such employment poles. While these results might seem superficially consistent with other models, recent work (Weiler, 2001) explicitly tests the dualistic perspective against several other competing labor market frameworks. The empirical results show that the dual market model clearly outperforms other perspectives in its analysis of local unemployment. Based on these findings, this paper goes on to apply the hypothesized dual labor market perspective to the regional labor markets of western Germany. The responsiveness of the western German labor force to structural shocks appears to be more muted than in the West Virginia case, supporting the oft-noted hypothesized flexibility of the American labor market. Given that West Virginia workers themselves have relatively high mobility costs, such a discrepancy is noteworthy. The combination of less concrete unemployment adjustment along with the evidence of slower structural change suggests that these European labor markets may indeed exhibit less flexibility, producing more stubborn local joblessness as Germany's less mobile unemployed adjust more slowly to changing employment prospects. Furthermore, the German evidence indicates that men's unemployment rates are far more sensitive to changes in high-wage industry fortunes, indicating their disproportionate dominance of these positions even in this more highly integrated economy. It could be argued that West Virginia may be a special case. Its unique features in fact make the state's county labor markets an ideal initial benchmark for such structural analyses. The bifurcated local industrial structure, the isolation of county labor markets, and the structural change that has occurred over the last 20 years make the counties of this state a natural empirical laboratory. Given the strength of the dual market model in describing West Virginia's unemployment situation, this research has been oriented toward other areas facing structural unemployment. The German scenario is typical of Western European labor markets, which have had considerably more difficulty with such pernicious unemployment than the United States (Pencavel, 1994). This paper's results indicate that both the labor demand and supply sides are less flexible, a fact which may be partially responsible for Germany's continuing local problems in adjusting to changing structural factors. Several other unemployment questions become clearer when considered through this paper's perspective. Persistent unemployment in stagnating areas despite considerable out-migration (e.g., in Europe, McCormick & Sheppard, 1992) can be explained by workers queuing for increasingly scarce high-wage jobs. Regions with shrinking primary industries are likely to be especially affected. Higher levels of unemployment among the less-skilled (Topel, 1993) reflect those workers who face prolonged queuing for the few attractive positions remaining at their skill levels. The clear decline in wages among dislocated manufacturing workers who change sectors (Ruhm, 1991) emphasizes the incentive to maintain high-wage sector networks even through unemployment, particularly if mobility costs are high.