Inspecting regional economic structural changes through linking occupations and industries

The increasing integration of the world economy has demonstrated the critical need to identify industries and associated skill sets that could help regions maintain their competitiveness. The challenge is to align human capital with current and emerging trends of the regional economy. This study presents a framework to explore regional economic structural changes in terms of occupation–industry linkages and deciphers an array of economic signals that generate the dynamics of regional economic changes based upon an enhanced understanding of systematic occupation–industry linkages. Bicausative analysis and hypothetical industry extraction methods are adapted to serve these purposes, with applications to both state and national levels in the US between 2005 and 2008. The findings derived from these linkage studies offer insights into the spatially heterogeneous patterns of economic changes, and help overcome conventional, one-dimensional understandings of the dynamics of economic transformation. <br> <b>Keywords:</b> regional economic development, structural change, occupation–industry linkages, key sector