Job losses in European industry have been more because of increased productivity than because of the process of deindustrialization over the last 20 years, according to the MISTA project conducted as part of the ESPON European cooperation programme specializing in regional analysis.
It said this trend was visible in the major European cities and the development of new technologies has played a key role.
All the urban areas observed registered economic growth between 1995 and 2017, the researchers observed, while labour intensity decreased in almost all.
"Increased productivity is what plays a decisive role in the loss of jobs in industry in Europe's urban areas," said Peter Huber of the Austrian Institute of Economic Research (WIFO).
Specifically, a quarter of the main metropolitan regions of Europe were characterized by industrial growth in the 1995-2017 period, the main result of an increase in productivity.
In other metropolitan regions observed, including Rome, Milan, Naples and Turin, deindustrialization phenomenon formed a significant component, but a lesser one, in the transformation of industrial employment.
Half of these regions benefited from a strong metropolitan environment that held back the loss of jobs in the sector: this is the case of Rome and Milan, as well as Paris, Brussels, Warsaw and Budapest, to name some.
In the remaining urban areas, deindustrialization took place in weak metropolitan environments.
This group, which includes Turin and Naples, as well as Berlin, Vienna, Dublin and Barcelona, is mainly comprised of cities in countries that joined the European Union before 2004, with medium and high income levels and frequently with a mixed economic structure or one based on services.
"New technologies have had a fundamental role in the transformation of industrial employment," explained Valeria Fedeli, a lecturer in urban planning and policy at the Politecnico di Milano university.
"On the one hand, they reduced the number of jobs, but, on the other, they caused the quality of employment in the sector to grow.
"This trend can help local administrations not to think of the cities as just fields of competition between residential and tertiary functions, but also as complex subjects in which powerful new interactions between manufacturing, services, culture and residence exist".
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