Unemployment in the Greek regions of Attica and Central Macedonia: comparative econometric analysis between the 2nd and the 3rd CSFs

The basic aim of this paper is to investigate the unemployment risk and job prospects of individuals in the two most populated Greek regions, Attica and Central Macedonia, during the implementation of the second (1994 to 1999) and the third (2000 to 2006) community support frameworks (CSFs). More specifically, we research what are the social and demographic characteristics that increase the chances of someone in the examined population finding a job, exploring individuals according to gender, age, marital status, residence location, level of education, immigrant status, registered in the manpower employment organisation (OAED) and participation in training courses. Also, we try to investigate whether university graduates face greater difficulties in finding a job than non-university graduates, as a series of studies or aggregate statistics for Greece conclude. We use individual anonymised records (micro-data) of the labour force survey (LFS) for both employed and unemployed at for nomenclature of territorial units statistics (NUTS)-2 level. The findings of the logit model are mixed for all the variables used, apart from those of gender, marital status, participation in training programmes and registered in OAED for which the results have no differences among regions and years. The paper does offer evidence that could be useful for comparative research among European regions.