Employment growth in Danish towns and regions since the crisis: industrial structure, city size and location, 2008–2013

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper examines employment growth in Danish towns by region, industrial structure and size since the 2008 financial crisis. Employment growth has generally been concentrated in large city-regions in recent decades and peripheral regions have suffered from de-industrialization and employment loss. Yet, little is known about the development of towns outside the city-regions, nor of the smaller towns within them. The crisis in 2008 led to a strong reduction in employment in Denmark and there is a need to understand the geographical consequences of the crisis. This paper uses register-based micro-data from Statistics Denmark and employs descriptive statistics and robust regression to analyse the changes in employment that towns experienced during the crisis (2008–2013). The analysis reveals four main conclusions. First, town size matters, as the larger a town is, the better it performed. Second, the greater the industrial diversity, the less towns were affected by the crisis. Third, towns dominated by either construction and manufacturing or specific service industries were hit hardest by the crisis. Fourth, the regional locations of towns and their proximity to a larger town or city are important for employment growth.