Varieties occupational change in Europe after the great recession

ABSTRACT

This paper empirically explores occupational change in Europe after the 2008-crisis (the Great Recession). During this period, which has remained relatively unexplored by the literature so far, many European economies have implemented profound institutional changes in their labour markets and transformed their growth models. Using individual-level data of 18 economies, I build three indicators of job quality -the average educational attainment, the median earnings and an index of job instability based on the contractual characteristics of the job- and analyse relative employment growth of jobs. The findings suggest that there is not just one pattern of occupational change in Europe, in opposition to the mainstream view of pervasive polarisation. On the contrary, I detect a variety of occupational change profiles, which even differ within the same country depending on the indicator employed.

KEYWORDS:

• Occupational change
• structural change
• Europe
• labor markets
• institutions

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges the financial support from the Margarita Salas Posdoctoral Fellowships (CT31/21) fundedwith the NextGenerationEU Funds. This work is part of two research projects: PID2022-136664OA-I00 funded by Agencia Estatal de Investigación of the Ministry of Science and Innovation (Spanish Government) and PR3/23-30810 funded by the Complutense University of Madrid.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10301763.2024.2349283

Notes

1. These authors only found a polarisation pattern in the UK when earnings constitute the job quality indicator.

2. A critique to concept of routine is made by Fernández-Macías and Hurley (2017), who argue that it is elusive and difficult to be measured. They propose an index and find that routine tasks are not predominantly found in middle-paid or skilled jobs, but rather in low-paid/skilled ones.

3. Especially in finance and insurance, information services, and professional and technical services (Blinder and Krueger 2013).

4. Petrović and Matić (2023) hold that the Visegrad group have managed to close the gap in productivity against core Europe thanks to foreign investments in the manufacturing sector that profoundly transformed the composition of their economies towards cutting-edge manufacturing industries. They find a Central European manufacturing core characterised by tight regional supply chains comprising the Visegrad countries, Austria and Germany.

5. Spain has increased the minimum wage 35.9% since 2018 and a labour market reform was passed in 2021 that heavily limit the use of temporary contracts. However, this is not captured by the data used.

6. Brekelmans & Petropoulos (2020) also find a down-skilling pattern in Hungary and Belgium in the 2009–2016 period, meaning that the impact of the crisis was primarily absorbed by high and medium-skilled workers.

7. This paper uses median wages relative to median wages of low-end jobs as a measure of wage compression.

8. $\mathit{ft}\mathit{eq}.\mathit{grosswage}=\frac{\mathit{annual}\mathit{cash}\mathit{gross}\mathit{earnings}}{\mathit{months}\mathit{in}\mathit{ft}\mathit{jobs}+\left(\mathit{months}\mathit{in}\mathit{pt}\mathit{jobs}\ast \left(\frac{\mathit{pt}}{\mathit{ft}}\right)\right)}$

9. This is the average of the median job wage of each country.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Herrero

Daniel Herrero is an Associate Professor at the Complutense University of Madrid and Associate Researcher at ths Complutense Institute of International Studies (ICEI).