Regional unemployment patterns and the spatial dimensions of macro-economic policy: the Canadian experience 1966-1975

The persistence of relatively high unemployment rates in certain regions of many western industrial countries is well-established. These problems have been acknowledged, in part, in macro-economic labour market policies and also in regional economic development programmes. The paper re-examines the spatial dimensions and components of regional unemployment in Canada by way of an analysis of monthly unemployment data for 1966-75 for some 33 economic regions and 9 metropolitan areas. With these dimensions established, an evaluation is made of Canadian macro-economic policies from the point of view of determining how sensitive they are to these particular spatial components. It is concluded that the unemployment insurance and manpower assistance programmes, while acknowledging explicitly the broad regional dimensions of the unemployment problem, nevertheless filter out important spatial variations and, as a consequence, appear to have been of only limited effectiveness.