THE SPATIAL EFFECTS OF LABOUR POLICIES PROMOTED IN ITALY FROM MID ’90 TO 2006: AN ANALYSIS IN THE EU CONTEXT (Full paper not available on this website Accepted for publication: European Planning Studies Vol. 19, No. 2, February 2011).

(Full paper not available on this website Accepted for publication: European Planning Studies Vol. 19, No. 2, February 2011). It is widely known that one of the most important economic and social facts concerning the European Union consists in the mismatch among its regions in terms of unemployment rates. The purpose of this paper is that of analysing the role of geographical mobility of production inputs (in particular of labour) in the automatic adjustment mechanisms. In particular, the paper aims at examining and measuring the efficiency of Italian policies for labour market carried out in the last 10 years, in terms of reduction of the regional disparities in comparison with the whole European distribution of unemployment. We question if these policies have been successful or the territorial dimension has still a role on the unemployment problem in Italy. We answer to this question by calculating the Theil Index (Walsh and O’Kelly, 1979) using data from 1996 to 2006 on unemployment and participation from Eurostat on NUTS 2 level, comparing Italian data with other EU countries ones. Our results show that Italy has still a prominent role in the geographical disparities among regions and that its contribution to the geographical concentration of unemployment is still high (especially if we consider female and youth unemployment).