Rural employment in OECD countries: Structure and dynamics of regional labour markets

In most OECD countries, unemployment rates are higher in rural than in urban regions and labour force participation rates are lower in rural than in urban regions. In all countries, rural women are under-represented in the labour force. Rural areas of many OECD countries will be confronted with substantial increases in their working-age population. This will generate uneven territorial pressures for labour market adjustments that will require either creating additional jobs, coping with higher unemployment or facilitating migration flows. 0Some rural regions belong to the most dynamic areas within OECD countries. They were more successful in generating new employment opportunities than were national economies as a whole. The dynamism of these regions shows that rurality in itself is not an obstacle to job creation. For lagging rural regions, dynamic rural regions probably provide a more realistic development model than do urbanized regions. The success of the dynamic rural regions is not due to favourable sectoral mixes. Like most other rural regions, they tend to have shares in declining industries that are higher than the national average. The positive performance in creating rural employment results from specific territorial dynamics that are not yet properly understood, but probably include aspects such as regional identity and entrepreneurial climate, public and private networks, or the attractiveness of the cultural and natural environment.