A stereoscopic perspective of occupational structure: The case of the main cities of Chile

The structure of occupations by activity is not similar across a country (Barbour and Markusen, 2007). While this is true for most occupations, it is not the case for those that are knowledge intensive, which tend to be spatially concentrated. This article proposes a methodology to analyze the differences between the occupational and the industrial structures of regions and cities, and to identify which occupations contribute more to producing functional heterogeneity, controlling by sectoral differences. This methodology is applied in the case of the main cities of Chile using information from the 2002 census. The results show that, controlling by sector differences, a group of occupations introduce significant differences between cities, revealing their position in a hierarchy of functional relations