Trends and cross-regional differences in the Belgian labour market
Abstract
This paper presents a number of figures on the major trends in the labour market in the three regions in Belgium. I find that, while (since 2015) the unemployment rate has dropped in all three regions, the activity rate has been rising, decreasing and constant in the Flemish Region, the Brussels-Capital Region and in the Walloon Region, respectively. In turn, I find that such discrepancies seem to originate chiefly from opposite trends in the activity rate of youth under 25 and in that of higher educated individuals (both increasing in the Flemish Region and decreasing in the Brussels-Capital Region). I also examine how personal and family characteristics affect the probability for an individual to be active and to be unemployed, and how these probabilities differ in the three regions. In terms of sign, I find that the main divergences across regions originate from household composition. In terms of size, I find that the magnitude of most of the explanatory variables correlated with such probabilities changes sharply across regions. This is particularly remarkable for the diminishing marginal returns on education, which are much less pronounced in the Brussels-Capital Region than in the other two regions.
