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Diese Studie untersucht, welche Lehren aus den Erfahrungen nordamerikanischer Städte hinsichtlich der Entwicklung neuer Möglichkeiten einer exportorientierten Produktion in Großstädten gezogen werden können. Zu diesem Zweck wurden sechs Fallstudien zu nordamerikanischen Metropolregionen durchgeführt, die sich durch einen hohen wirtschaftlichen Entwicklungsstand und eine hohe Lebensqualität auszeichnen. Dies waren Atlanta, Boston, Montreal, Pittsburgh, San Francisco und Seattle. Der aktuelle Bericht fasst diese Fallstudien zusammen, stellt einen datenbasierten Vergleich der jeweiligen Metropolregionen mit Wien dar und diskutiert eine Reihe von Erfahrungen, aus denen die Stadt Wien potenziell lernen könnte.

Lifelong learning is of increasing importance for developed countries facing structural change and rising labour market dynamics. To foster lifelong learning, Austria introduced an educational leave programme ("Bildungskarenz") in 1998. Two reforms, in 2001 and 2008, have since made this programme one of the most generous educational leave programmes among OECD countries. The 2001 reform increased the leave benefit to the level of the unemployment replacement rate, but only for employees of age 45 or older. For those under 45 the benefit level remained at the much-lower level of subsistence allowance. This differential treatment ended in 2008, when a major reform aligned the leave benefit for employees under the age of 45 to those for older employees. Using administrative data on all private sector employees in Austria the research proposed in this project will use this 2008 reform to analyse the causal effect of an increase in benefit generosity on programme take-up. We will also analyse whether the reform has had heterogeneous effects on participation in lifelong learning for different subgroups of the labour force. Furthermore, we will investigate whether participation in lifelong learning has a positive effect on the wage of programme participants, whether the 2008 reform had an effect on the difference between pre- and post-participation wages and which subgroups show the largest benefit from taking educational leave. Finally, we will analyse whether participation in lifelong learning increases individuals' resilience against macroeconomic shocks and investigate whether those who took educational leave had lower unemployment during the Great Recession.

This project uses the rich historic experience of repeated large-scale and unexpected economic (dis-)integrations at the Austrian-Czech border to test the predictions of economic geography models of regional development. In particular we analyse the impact of these dis-integration events on regional development: first, in both Austria and the Czech Republic so that we focus on two countries which for a substantial part of the period analysed were characterised by rather different political regimes and huge differences in incomes and costs, that additionally changed over time; second, for a large set of (dis-)integration episodes that span a period of almost a century so that we compare different (dis-)integration events, that took place at different points in time at which the considered countries differed substantially in income levels and institutions; third, with respect to many potential adjustments (such as population and employment and unemployment growth as well as firm entry and exit) that will inform future research on the mechanisms through which the regional economic effects of integration operate.

Das WIFO erstellt vierteljährlich einen Bericht zur Konjunktur in den österreichischen Bundesländern, der über die jeweils rezente Entwicklung in wesentlichen Wirtschaftssektoren und auf dem regionalen Arbeitsmarkt Aufschluss gibt.