Economic Geography

From unemployment to non-employment
In the days of ‘slack’ labour markets, job loss and unemployment were key
concerns for researchers concerned with labour market geographies. Over time,

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Anne Green
however, unemployment has come to account for an ever-smaller proportion of
non-employment. A range of different data sources have confirmed that unemploy-
ment has become an increasingly unreliable measure of labour reserve, and even
more importantly from a geographical perspective, the ‘more difficult’ the local
labour market, the smaller proportion of non-employment that unemployment
captures, and the larger the share accounted for by long-term sickness (Mackay
1999). As conventional measures of unemployment have depressed the degree
of spatial variation in labour reserve, so labour market analysts have been advo-
cated the use of broader measures of non-employment (Green and Owen 1998)
and the focus of policy attention has shifted increasingly to the inactive (who typi-
cally are more heterogeneous than the unemployed – since they include those
looking after the home and family, who suffer sickness/disability, students, etc.).
From ‘quantity’ to ‘quality’ of employment
In contrast to ‘quantitative’ concerns about ‘mass unemployment’ in the 
mid 1980s, with a ‘tightening’ of labour markets there has been a shift towards
greater policy emphasis on ‘qualitative’ aspects of employment, and on the 
role of skills as a key driver in regional competitiveness (the promotion of the
‘healthy’ labour market concept also reflects this trend). As a result the geography
of occupations and skills has risen up the policy agenda. Geographers in private
sector consultancy have been particularly influential and active here in entering
and shaping the policy debate and making their results accessible and informative
to policymakers. Local Futures’ Regional Economic Architecture (Hepworth and
Spencer 2003) adopts a four-fold knowledge-intensity classification to map and
measure the demand- and supply-side of the regional geography of the knowledge
economy in Britain, utilising an effective ‘on one page’ display and colour coding
to indicate regional performance vis-à-vis the national average. This presentation
is effective in highlighting key messages, such as the role of London as a knowl-
edge economy hub and the importance of the public sector as a key driver of the
knowledge economy in the North and Midlands. More detailed employment and
labour force data at regional and sub-regional levels underpin these ‘top’ level
results. Geographers in academia can and do contribute to the policymaking
process, but perhaps not as much as they could (Martin 2001).