Book review of the labour market impact of the EU enlargement: a new regional geography of Europe?

• Author: Quintero-Rojas, Coralia
• Position: Book review

This book summarises the main results of the works presented at the XXII Annual Conference of the Italian Association of Labour Economists. The authors of the various essays included provide us with a thought-provoking book that raises many important issues relating to the structural changes and convergence process that have taken place in EU countries, but from the particular perspective of labour aspects. Europe has gone through a severe restructuring process since the collapse of the communist regimes prevalent in the Eastern European Block in the early 90s, barely 20 years ago. This process has entailed not only economic adjustment, but also adjustment in other spheres--the social, the political, the military, and so on--, and has affected all the countries and markets of Europe at both an individual and aggregate level. Of course, this restructuring process has been greater, deeper and more relevant in those countries that moved from a regime of central planning to one of a market-oriented economy, which led to profound change in all of their structures: from a dictatorial, governmental and centralised structure towards a democratic, decentralised and market-oriented one.

The two major questions addressed in the book can be summarised as follows: how did regional imbalances emerge among the new EU members compared to those present in the old, and does the lack of regional convergence apply to the new EU members as well? The contributions presented are grouped into four sections, each of which addresses a specific question concerning the principal aspects of the new situation of the European labour market and the relevant facts observed in the data, such as the differences in persistence in the labour market and the apparent lack of convergence among the member countries.

Part I, comprised of two papers, analyses the effects of structural change on the distribution of income growth rates and employment opportunities across regions.

The first paper, "Structural Change and Labour Reallocation Across Regions: A Review of the Literature", by Floro Ernesto Caroleo and Francesco Pastore, introduces the key questions and summarises the on-going research into the causes of regional imbalances in the labour market, whilst focusing on the role of structural change. The analysis presented calls for more state intervention in favour of backward regions than has been the case in the past, and also evaluates a number of proposals. The authors' argument effectively challenges the conventional wisdom on what fiscal policy should be. However, they also point out the deficiencies of traditional models in analysing the particular features of the region, and suggest the need to look at the latter from a more region-specific perspective.

Similarly, Jan Bruha, Delia Ionascu and Byeongju Jeong question the traditional view of labour unions as the key factor in causing stagnation in their paper "Organized Labour...