Job Accessibility, Residential Segregation and Risk of Long-term Unemployment in the Paris Region

The research presented in this paper explores, in the French context, the hypothesis that employment problems experienced by low-skilled jobseekers are partially caused by spatial urban factors. Many low-skilled workers live in poor neighbourhoods where they are exposed to a distressed social environment and/or weak job accessibility. For reasons discussed in this article, living in such neighbourhoods may increase the duration of unemployment for jobseekers. On the basis of an empirical study, this hypothesis is tested in the Paris–Île-de-France metropolitan area and addresses the question: all other things being equal, are low-skilled workers living in high-poverty neighbourhoods and/or neighbourhoods with low job accessibility exposed to a greater risk of long-term unemployment? whereas skilled and highly educated workers are much less affected. In France in 1999,1 the unemployment rate was 18 per cent for unskilled blue-collar workers, 16 per cent for skilled blue-collar workers and 15.5 per cent for low-skilled clerical workers,2 levels that are incomparably higher than the 4 per cent unemployment rate for executive managers. As in many countries, the high rate of unemployment for low-skilled workers in France is mainly a result of macro-economic and macro-social trends that have profoundl