Cultural Amenities and Unemployment in Dutch Cities: Disentangling a Consumerist and Productivist Explanation for Less-educated Urbanites’ Varying Unemployment Levels across Urban Economies

Abstract

Previous studies on the advanced economies have shown that unemployment levels of the less-educated are low in cities with high employment shares in the advanced producer services. Scholars have consistently interpreted this finding according to Sassen’s polarisation thesis. This article confronts this production-based interpretation with a competing consumption-based explanation, which focuses on the role of cultural amenities. Analysing data on 22 Dutch metropolitan agglomerations between 1996 and 2008, it is shown that, in line with consumerists notions of Richard Florida, advanced producer services settle in cities that are rich in cultural amenities, instead of the other way around as classical labour-follows-capital explanations imply. Yet, only advanced producer services prove to reduce the unemployment levels of the less-educated, meaning that the polarisation thesis, and not the theory on cultural amenities, is a valid explanation for the low level of unemployment in post-industrial cities.