Spatial mismatch, education and language skills in the Brussels metropolis: an analysis
Notes de la rédaction
This is the press release related to the article from Tobias Theys, Nick Deschacht, Stef Adriaensens and Dieter Verhaest, published on June 17, 2019. Read the article.
Despite the fact that the Brussels-Capital Region is the country's main employment centre, its unemployment rate of around 15 % still remains particularly high, even if it is trending downwards. For the low-skilled, the situation is even more worrying with – in certain cases – an unemployment rate twice as high as the average.
The poor match between job supply and demand in the Brussels-Capital Region is regularly highlighted, which justifies public policies largely based on job training. But it also neglects another aspect of the problem: are existing jobs created in Brussels adapted to its inhabitants? The peri-urbanization of the inhabitants, but also of the activities at the metropolitan level, contributes to a growing spatial mismatch between job supply and demand. This inadequacy would force Brussels jobseekers – and particularly the low-skilled – to expand their field of research in order to increase their chances of finding a job. But in the Brussels periphery, this expansion obviously raises the problem of the workers' knowledge of the Dutch language... and of the employers' requirements in this respect.
To examine this question in numerical terms, three economists and a sociologist from the KULeuven University, Tobias Theys, Nick Deschacht, Dieter Verhaest and Stef Adriaenssens compared the spatial proximity between jobseekers and job offers in the Brussels metropolitan area, respectively for low-skilled and high-skilled people and profiles.
Their results show that spatial mismatch, regardless of the definition of the metropolitan area, is higher for the low-skilled. This inadequacy stems mainly from the fact that jobseekers do not reside where the job offers that might interest them are located. By comparing the situation of the low-skilled with and without knowledge of the other national language, the authors find that competition for the low-skilled without language skills is stronger in Brussels, but that the distribution of vacancies and job seekers in the 19 municipalities of the Region is more balanced for them.
On the basis of these results, the researchers first conclude that job-seekers gain from investing in the knowledge of Dutch: not only is there less competition in the labour market for the low-skilled with language skills and for the high-skilled, but the spatial match between jobseekers and job offers is also better in these cases. A second conclusion is the importance of the outgoing commute: currently, it is inevitable that a considerable part of the low-skilled of the Brussels Region will not only have to move to the periphery but also beyond, in order to find work. In a context of increasing congestion and public transport's difficulty to reach the distant peripheries it remains crucial to maintain or even develop activities that provide low-skilled jobs in the city or in its close periphery.
Finally, the authors also draw attention to the institutional context. For a growing number of Brussels workers the competent employment office they have to attend is not one that is active in the Flemish and Walloon parts of the metropolitan area. In addition, the language of VDAB job offers is often Dutch, whereas the majority of Brussels job-seekers do not speak it. Enhanced collaboration between the three offices (Actiris, VDAB and Forem) to achieve automatic availability of job vacancies in the language of the job seeker therefore also appears to be a prerequisite in the fight against the supply-demand mismatch on the labour market of the Brussels metropolis.
References
Tobias Theys, Nick Deschacht, Stef Adriaensens and Dieter Verhaest, “Spatial mismatch, education and language skills in the Brussels metropolis: an analysis”, Brussels Studies [Online], General collection, No 136, 17 June 2019. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/brussels/2803
Contact
Benjamin Wayens, Senior Editor: bwayens[at]brusselsstudies.be