Spatial Labor Markets

Abstract

National labor markets are based on the fiction that information is available everywhere and that mobility causes no costs. Therefore, national labor markets are merely social constructs, which in reality are replaced by a multitude of spatial labor markets. They represent concrete spatial units, where supply and demand are confronted. The way in which they are to be differentiated cannot be defined generally or extensively. The purpose of the differentiation determines the method. But research has shown that the structure and dynamics of the spatial labor markets depend systematically on their geographic characteristics (location, centrality, density). Unemployment, wage levels, professional careers, the qualification of the manpower supply, and the structure of working places differ clearly between urban and rural labor markets. The task of an applied labor market geography is to highlight the relationship between the characteristics of the labor market on the one hand and the geographic characteristics of the spatial labor markets on the other.