Uneven shifts: the geography of occupational change in France, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom, 1992–2018

ABSTRACT Amid renewed interest in geographical inequalities in life chances and an ongoing debate about occupational upgrading versus polarisation, we investigate how the occupational structure changed across NUTS-2 regions in France, Italy, Spain and the UK between 1992 and 2018. Against the expectation that national upgrading trends may mask a diversity of regional upgrading, downgrading and polarisation experiences, EU Labour Force Survey data show clear and unambiguous upgrading. In every region, employment in high quality jobs grew while employment in low quality jobs shrank. These shifts were often large in magnitude: the proportion of employment in high quality jobs increased by more than 10 percentage points in two thirds of the regions studied. However, there was considerable heterogeneity in the rate and type of occupational upgrading. Strong upgrading and employment growth in the economic capital regions of Île-de-France (Paris), Lombardy, Madrid and London contrasted with weaker upgrading and sluggish (or even negative) employment growth in regions like Lorraine, Sicily, Extremadura and the West Midlands. That these and many regions have yet to achieve the same proportion of high quality jobs that the economic capitals possessed in 1992 highlights the greater relative difficulty of ascending to the top of the occupational structure in some places than in others.