This paper provides a method to classify TL3 regions across OECD countries based on their level of access to metropolitan areas. TL3 regions are classified as 'metropolitan' if more than half of their population lives in one or more functional urban area (FUA) of at least 250 thousand inhabitants and as 'non-metropolitan' otherwise. The method sub-classifies metropolitan regions into 'large metro' or 'metro' regions based on the population size of the FUAs located within those regions. Non-metropolitan TL3 regions are sub-classified into: with access to a metro, with access to a small/medium city, or remote based on their level of access to a FUA with population above a predetermined threshold. The method relies on publicly available grid-level population data and localised information on driving conditions.

This paper explores the relationship between pay inequality and unemployment rates for 187 European Regions from 1984–2003. We measure inequality within the regions between 16 industrial sectors in each region – and also between the regions: thus, the inequality measures are nested. Our model of unemployment employs a panel structure that permits us to separate regional, national and continental influences on European unemployment. This allows us to test whether a tradeoff exists between cohesion and competitiveness. We find no evidence of this tradeoff; instead, lower pay inequality is generally associated with a lower regional unemployment rate. We find strong country effects lowering unemployment (relative to the model) in relatively smaller countries such as Ireland, Austria, Portugal and the Netherlands; on the other hand unemployment is high, relative to the model, in Spain and Poland. Time effects reveal the effects of European macro‐environment on regional unemployment. We find an employment penalty associated with the Maastricht Treaty (1992) and its implementation of around four percentage points, lasting until 1998, when a general reduction in unemployment appears to coincide with the arrival of the euro. Unfortunately, the pattern is again reversed in 2000, coinciding with the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty. The analysis has grave implications for the consequences of the crisis of 2008 and after, although data on this period will not become available for some time.Europe, unemployment, regional inequality, R12, E02, J31,

Using a panel of 265 regions from 24 OECD countries from 1997 to 2007, we explore the impact of nation-wide macroeconomic and structural policies on the productivity growth of subnational regions. We find that average relationships between nation-wide policies and regional productivity growth can hide strong differentiated effects according to the distance to the frontier: relaxing employment protection legislation on temporary contracts, lowering barriers to trade and investment and increasing trade openness enhances productivity growth in lagging regions, whereas reducing barriers to entrepreneurship or higher levels of government debt has a positive effect on regions closer to the productivity frontier.

Recent nonparametric studies find that the regional distribution of unemployment rates is more dependent on geographic location (neighborhood effects) than on national factors (state effects). These results, however, do not control for stochastic dependency between neighborhood and state effects (joint effects) and do not provide any measure of their relative size. In this paper, we construct a simple measure that is invariant in space and across time and compare state, neighborhood, and joint effects in Europe and North America. We find that neighborhood effects are stronger than state effects in Europe, whereas in North America the size of the joint effect is such that one cannot say which effects prevail.