The geography of public services employment in Europe: concentration or dispersion?

Abstract

It is widely known that the location of public services generates, directly and indirectly, important economic effects. The objective of this article is to examine the spatial distribution of employment in public services in 124 European regions in order to detect the existence of some pattern of spatial location. To do so we employ various exploratory spatial analysis techniques, such as the calculation of the Moran's I and the Geary's C statistics. The results obtained highlight the existence of remarkable differences among the European regions, and more concretely between the Scandinavian and the Mediterranean regions, differences that deserve further study.

Keywords:

• employment
• exploratory spatial analysis
• public services
• regions

Notes

1. Peacock and Scott (2000) identify up to 12 different specifications in the empirical papers aimed at estimating Wagner's law.

2. For a survey of the literature on public sector employment see Gregory and Borland (1999).

3. One of the main reasons for the relocation of public employment out of London and the South East is cost saving. For an exhaustive analysis of this issue see Marshall et al. (1991) and Marshall (1996).

4. The countries and regions included in the analysis are described in the Appendix.

5. This group also includes two minor branches that are not public services: private households with employed persons; extra-territorial organisations and bodies.

6. We take these two years because they are the initial and the final years, respectively, of the time series of regional employment in Europe elaborated by Eurostat.

7. We show the average number of usual weekly hours of work in the main job (full-time).