Matti Kortteinen

Unemployment During a Recession and Later Earnings: Does the Neighbourhood Unemployment Rate Modify the Association?

Experience of unemployment is known to predict poorer future success in the labour market. It is less well known how much this depends on the characteristics of the local social environment. This paper builds on the supposition that the unemployment rate in the neighbourhood modifies the social processes linking personal unemployment to later labour market outcomes. Data from the Helsinki metropolitan area in Finland during and after a deep recession in the 1990s are used to analyse the effect of personal unemployment on later earnings by neighbourhood unemployment rate. Results indicate that the neighbourhood unemployment rate modifies the effect of personal unemployment: a higher neighbourhood unemployment rate predicts lower later earnings, especially for males. A similar effect is not found in the case of employed residents.

Experience of a Preventive Experiment: Spatial Social Mixing in Post-World War II Housing Estates in Helsinki, Finland

The contingent of large housing estates built in the 1960s and 1970s accounts for almost a half of all high-rises in Finland. The primary ideology in their genesis was to combine industrially prefabricated urban housing development with the surrounding forest landscape—together with a policy of spatial social mixing—to prevent social disorder and segregation. These policies seemed to work as intended until the early 1990s, but have since proved to be insufficient. With Western integration and new information and communication-based economic growth, new trends of population differentiation have emerged. As new wealth has moved out to the fringes of cities, the large housing estates have declined socio-economically—and have been enriched ethnically. This differentiation is structurally produced, works through the regional housing market and, as such, is beyond the scope of the preventive policies pursued. Recent attempts at controlling the regional markets and new forms of spatial social mixing have so far proved difficult.