Floro Ernesto Caroleo and Francesco Pastore This book was conceived to collect selected essays presented at the session on The Labour Market Impact of the European Union Enlargements. A New Regional Geography of Europe? of the XXII Conference of the Italian Association of Labour Economics (AIEL). The session aimed to stimulate the debate on the continuity/ fracture of regional patterns of development and employment in old and new European Union (EU) regions. In particular, we asked whether, and how different, the causes of emergence and the evolution of regional imbalances in the new EU members of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) are compared to those in the old EU members. Several contributions in this book suggest that a factor common to all backward regions, often neglected in the literature, is to be found in their higher than average degree of structural change or, more precisely, in the hardship they expe- ence in coping with the process of structural change typical of all advanced economies. In the new EU members of CEE, structural change is still a consequence of the continuing process of transition from central planning to a market economy, but also of what Fabrizio et al. (2009) call the second transition, namely that related to the run-up to and entry in the EU.

An Overview of the Main Issues and the Role of Structural Change.- Structural Change and Labour Reallocation Across Regions: A Review of the Literature.- Organized Labour and Restructuring: Coal Mines in the Czech Republic and Romania.- New Evidence on Spatial Convergence.- Labour Productivity Polarization Across Western European Regions: Threshold Effects Versus Neighbourhood Effects.- Transition, Regional Features, Growth and Labour Market Dynamics.- Regional Dynamics of Unemployment in Poland A Convergence Approach.- Spatial Distribution of Key Macroeconomic Growth Indicators in the EU-27: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation.- Is Migration Reinforcing Regional Unemployment Differences?.- Internal Labour Mobility in Central Europe and the Baltic Region: Evidence from Labour Force Surveys.- Spatial Search and Commuting with Asymmetric Changes of the Wage Distribution.- Where Do the Brainy Italians Go?.- Some Policy Tools.- Assessing Active Labour Market Policies in Transition Economies.- Regional Female Labour Force Participation: An Empirical Application with Spatial Effects.