Labour market polarisation as a localised process: evidence from Sweden

Martin Henning,Rikard H Eriksson

doi:10.1093/cjres/rsaa030

Abstract

Abstract The present article creates a link between contemporary labour market polarisation and regional divergence and analyses the spatial patterns of labour market polarisation in Swedish municipalities during the period 2002–2012. The results show that the national pattern of labour market polarisation is driven by polarisation in clusters of previously manufacturing-dominated municipalities with low- and medium-skill production, as well as increasing labour market polarisation and spatial selection within the fast-growing top-tier metropolitan regions. Outside these polarising spaces, most municipalities still experience job upgrading. The much-discussed abandonment of the traditional Western European job-upgrading model towards a polarising trajectory is thus not unequivocal. Regional labour market change and metropolitan selection cause great variation in labour market trajectories across space.

Highlights

There are widespread concerns that the post-industrial process of economic change comes with increasing labour market polarisation, driven by the changing composition of jobs (Autor et al, 2006; Goos and Manning, 2007; Goos et al, 2009)
While a sizeable body of literature deals with job polarisation in a range of countries on the national level and for the labour market as a whole, few studies have been concerned with this issue from a geographical point of view, despite the findings indicating that the regional division of work entails a strong spatial sorting of jobs (Wixe and Andersson, 2017)
Henning and Eriksson is unfortunate because the explanations for labour market polarisation remain contested in the literature, ranging from the impact of technological change to institutional liberalisation

Summary

Introduction

There are widespread concerns that the post-industrial process of economic change comes with increasing labour market polarisation, driven by the changing composition of jobs (Autor et al, 2006; Goos and Manning, 2007; Goos et al, 2009). While a sizeable body of literature deals with job polarisation in a range of countries on the national level and for the labour market as a whole, few studies have been concerned with this issue from a geographical point of view, despite the findings indicating that the regional division of work entails a strong spatial sorting of jobs (Wixe and Andersson, 2017) More detailed geographical analyses could offer more precise explanations for labour market changes that influence growing regional inequalities Such a perspective needs to go beyond the arguably reductionist (successful) core/(unsuccessful) periphery dichotomy that is often used to describe regional development patterns (Breau and Saillant, 2016). This is important because recent developments have created ‘...a finely grained, multi-scale territorial patchwork of diverging real incomes and rates of labour force participation...’ (Iammarino et al, 2019, 274)

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