Lukasz Arendt (p), Wojciech Grabowski

Olivier Crevoisier

The outburst of COVID-19 pandemic has re-boosted discussion on increasing pace of automation (especially in low-automated economies), which may lead to growing unemployment and labour market instability, and possible “end of work”. Such discussion was vivid even in the previous decade, with Frey and Osborne (2017) paper which triggered such discussion. And although there have been many critical arguments raised towards methodology used by Frey and Osborne, the result of their analysis have had perceptible impact on individuals’ fears of losing their jobs and technological unemployment in coming years.
However, both empirical studies and theoretical works (e.g. Acemoglu and Restrepo 2019; 2020) posit, that technological change and automation should have reinstatement effect leading to growing not declining number of jobs (West 2018). At the same time, inevitable result of technical change is the shift in employment (labour demand) and wage structures, which recently have been analysed in the task-content of jobs framework, with dominant approach based on the so-called ALM model (Autor et al., 2003). Importantly, the patterns of these shifts differ between highly-developed and developing countries (Arendt and Grabowski 2019; Hardy et al. 2018).
In the paper we are going to utilise the ALM task-content groups framework and estimate parameters of multilevel models to analyse the impact of technical change on shifts in distribution of employment and wage premia across the task-content groups. The analysis covers 11 European CEE countries classified as New Member States of the European Union, which are lagging as for the pace of technological advancements and automation compared to the “old” EU-15, more-developed countries. The goal of the study is to identify specific features of routinisation (task)-biased technical change in the CEE region. The analysis is based on EU LFS microdata retrieved from Eurostat.

Zoltán Elekes (p), Gergő Tóth, Rikard Eriksson

Lukasz Arendt

In this paper we set out to study how the skill-relatedness network structure of industries conditions the economic resilience of regions across 72 local labour markets in Sweden. Drawing on recent advancements in network science we stress-test skill-relatedness networks constructed from local labour flows between industries against the elimination of some of their nodes. We then validate the connection between such network robustness and employment growth in the context of the 2008 economic crisis. We find marked heterogeneity across regions in terms of network robustness. Our results from regression analysis support that regions endowed with more robust local skill-relatedness networks of industries experience higher employment growth particularly in the resistance stage of the unfolding crisis and its aftermath.

Alvertos Konstantinis (p), Dimitris Ballas, Paul Elhorst, Daniele Mantegazzi

Zoltán Elekes

During the past years, especially in the post Covid-19 pandemic era, the interest in precarious employment has increased, not solely as an academic discourse but also as a heated political and societal debate. The limited attention paid by regional sciences as a whole, and by economic geographers in particular, challenges us to examine the influence of geography on the individual precarity status through its potential spatio-temporal co-determination processes with macroscopic analysis hierarchies like households or regions. This research enriches the academic literature with three contributions. First, it quantifies the influence of regional and household characteristics on individual precarity after having proposed a three-pillar conceptualization of the phenomenon based on income, contract and "subjective precarity". Second, it provides evidence of precarity being a status holistically detrimental to well-being affecting one of its core elements, happiness. Finally, it questions whether fluctuations in individual happiness from year to year can be attributed to the transitions between standard employment, precarity and unemployment.

Olivier Crevoisier (p), Kimsa Maradan, Christophe Gironde

Alvertos Konstantinis

The role of the labour market in developing economies has largely been posited as a process of transition from informal work, linked to a traditional economy of low productivity, agriculture and trade, to a formalized labour market, offering more productive jobs and recognized by the state and social security institutions. It is a vision of development supported by well-established, often international, companies working on the basis of the Fordist wage relationship.

Based on research in the Ha Tien region of southern Vietnam, this article proposes the concept of occupational relationships (OR) to characterize the way in which workers now contribute to economic activities and their development. Unlike the classic employment relationship (the “rapport salarial” of the French regulation school), the OR captures the diversity of relational and institutional modalities through which labour contributes to development. Thus, in Vietnam, the labour market is particularly embedded in family structures that largely control the modalities of access to positions (recruitment, remuneration, etc.), determine the modalities of cooperation within the firm (hierarchy, flexibility, etc.), but also more broadly the modalities of access to entrepreneurship.

This shows that the vision of development and success in South Vietnamese society does not necessarily involve stable and formal jobs provided by international companies. Participation in the region's diffuse and vigorous growth through entrepreneurship, supported and strengthened by family networks, is a particularly mobilizing goal.