The aim of this book is to contribute to the debate on the continuity/fracture of regional patterns of development and employment in old and new European Union (EU) regions. Several contributions in this book suggest that a factor common to all backward regions, often neglected in the...

The focus of this chapter is on the microeconomic foundations of structural change and its spatially asymmetric impact on labour markets. EU economies are undergoing dramatic industrial restructuring due to a number of causes, such as the Eastward enlargement and economic integration of Central...

Very little is known about gender wage disparities in Kosovo and, to date, nothing is known about how such wage disparities evolve over time, particularly during the first few years spent by young workers in the labor market. More generally, not much is known about gender wage gaps in early...

The school-to-work transition represents a long dark tunnel for too many young people all over the world. Nonetheless, cross-country differences are striking: in Germany, young people fare no worse than their adult counterparts, while in the South- and Eastern-European Union countries young...

This essay aims to discuss the conditions for a successful implementation of the European Youth Guarantee in Italy. In principle, the program should be able to affect the frictional and mismatch components of unemployment, if not the Keynesian and neoclassical ones, as also the experience of...

This paper aims to provide a frame of mind to understand the link between structural change and regional unemployment, and, based on it, to survey the most recent literature. An overly optimistic view on the ability of the adjustment mechanism to generate convergence in local unemployment rates...