【摘要】At the end of 1990s, Danny Quah devoted several papers to the analysis of polar-ization and strati?cation in the convergence processes of economies, creating the image of the‘convergence clubs’ and suggesting the importance of studying the distribution dynamics of themacroeconomic variables. As for the labour markets, Overman and Puga (2002) showed that aprogressive polarization of unemployment was in fact occurring among the European regions in1986–1996, causing a phenomenon of cross-border clusterization. Here we propose to analysethe evolution of the unemployment rates of the EU 27 regions in the last two decades assumingthat the unemployment rates evolve according to a Gompertz stochastic process. The estimatedparameters of the process – intrinsic growth rate, deceleration factor, volatility – represent theevolutionary path of the unemployment rate and allow for estimating the steady state of theprocess. A cluster analysis is performed on the steady state values of the unemployment rates.The analysis con?rms the emergence of several ‘convergence clubs’ among the Europeanregional labour markets, which are compared to the clusters resulting from the more traditionalclusterization on the current unemployment rates.

【关键词】European regions;regional labour markets;convergence;Gompertz process

【文献来源】Stefano M. Iacus;Giuseppe Porro.Papers in Regional Studies.2015（4）