Spatialities of remote work across the EU regions in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic: Regional change, factors, interlinkages

Abstract

One of the most important implications of Covid-19 pertains to increasing trends of remote work, due to lockdown measures, mainly in knowledge-intensive sectors, that have changed work-life balance. These changes unfold unevenly among countries and regions, since, for instance, urban areas have a larger share of jobs that could be performed remotely. This paper studies how and why remote work unfolds unevenly across space in the context of Covid-19, thus enriching our understanding of shifting spatial organization of work after the pandemic arose. Particularly, using secondary figures from Eurostat and adopts fixed-effects and spatial error regression analysis in 217 EU NUTS2 regions with remote work rate in 2020 and the annual change between 2019 and 2020 as dependent variables. The paper then in-depth discusses and integrates the results into the regional socio-economic environment through two regions case-studies to better contextualize the findings. The results highlight the geographically uneven changes in the organization of work and the regional variation in remote working across the EU in the context of Covid-19. The regional industrial structure, policies to contain Covid-19, regional structural elements and demographics proved to be key factors of the spatialities of remote work.