Occupational structures across 25 EU countries: the importance of industry structure and technology in old and new EU countries.

This article analyzes the occupational structure of 25 European Union countries during the period 2000–2004. Shift-share analyses are used to decompose cross-country differences in occupational structure into within sector and between sectors effects. The static analysis for 2004 shows that the new member countries employ a lower share of skilled workers because their industry structure is biased towards less skill-intensive industries and because they use fewer skills within industries. The differences in the shares of (high-skilled) non-production workers are dominated by the between (industrial) effect. In contrast, the dynamic analysis of 2000–2004 showed that changes in the share of high-skilled non-production workers are mostly driven by within sector changes, which are probably related to skill-biased technological change. Similar trends in the countries’ within effects support the catch-up of the new member countries’ skills demand, while the structural developments that could equalize the industry mix of the new and old member countries are related to increased domestic demand and will probably take time.Occupational structure;Technological change;Industry structure;Technology diffusion;Transition economies;

The role of geographic mobility in reducing education-job mismatches in the Netherlands.

In this paper we investigate the relationship between geographic mobility and education-job mismatch in the Netherlands. We focus on the role of geographic mobility in reducing the probability of graduates working (i) jobs below their education level; (ii) jobs outside their study field; (iii) part-time jobs; (iv) flexible jobs; or (v) jobs paid below the wage expected at the beginning of the career. For this purpose we use data on secondary and higher vocational education graduates in the period 1996–2001. We show that graduates who are mobile have higher probability of finding jobs at the acquired education level than those who are not. Moreover, mobile graduates have higher probability of finding full-time or permanent jobs. This suggests that mobility is sought to prevent not only having to take a job below the acquired education level, but also other education-job mismatches; graduates are spatially flexible particularly to ensure full-time jobs.Geographic labour mobility;job mismatch;occupational choice;