Resilient, bouncing back or trapped?: Mapping responses to industrial restructuring pressure

Rudiger Ahrend, Laurenz Baertsch, Giuseppe Cappellari, Carlo Menon, Wessel Vermeulen and Zuzana Zavarska

No 2026/02, OECD Local Economic and Employment Development (LEED) Papers from OECD Publishing

Abstract: Industrial restructuring is a place-based process, shaped by the geographic concentration of sectors. Place-specific shocks, such as mass layoffs, add to the uneven geography of industrial restructuring. This paper identifies places exposed to intensified industrial restructuring pressure (IRP) and maps their socio-economic adjustment patterns, highlighting distinct trajectories of labour market adaptation. The analysis draws on a novel index, presented in the accompanying methodological paper Measuring industrial restructuring pressure in regions, capturing IRP episodes across different countries, time periods and types of shock. The IRP index aggregates employment outflows in declining sectors and puts additional weight on sectorally concentrated outflows. The index is applied to 449 urban labour markets in six OECD countries (Finland, France, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, and United States), over the period 1975 to 2023. Using the new IRP index, this paper examines how different places respond to restructuring pressures and explores structural factors that shape these trajectories.

Keywords: industrial restructuring; labour market transitions; local employment shocks; structural change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O14 O25 O33 R11 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-01-27
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oec:cfeaaa:2026/02-en

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