eWork and Regional Development: Background

The regional impact of eWork

The regional impacts of eWork cannot be seen in isolation from the wider context of regional economic development. The following table summarises much of the available evidence. Three geographic dimensions of comparative regional change are differentiated: the intra-regional, inter-regional and inter-national dimension (Massey, 1985, Hepworth, 1989, and Kotkin, 2000, reported in Biser, 2002).

Summary of the regional impact of eWork

	intra-regional	inter-regional	inter-national
Home-based eWork by employees (telehomeworking)	Urban sprawl; less demand for inner city office space; less traffic during peak hours; viability of public transport systems reduced.	Inter-city teleworking together with high-speed connections between upper tier urban agglomerations.	No significant impacts (only relevant for small elites of internationally active knowledge workers).
Multi-location eWork by employees (the mobile workforce)	Rising traffic volumes as a result of higher share of workers being on the move at any given time; increasing demand for short-term, flexible office space at nodes of (national/international) traffic networks; increasing dominance of ‘non-spaces’ in urban space.
eWorking by employees in remote offices owned by third parties, including in telecottages and telecentres	Telework centres are sometimes a policy measure to assist deprived and disadvantaged regions, but dependent on public financing	Telecottages have sometimes been successful in selling their services to clients in other regions or countries, but this is rare.
Freelance teleworkers or mobile workers	Potentially detached from locational constraints, but in practice social and business networks, which are still needed for working successfully as self-employed, can be created much more easily in central, mostly urban environments. Locations with high quality of life may benefit, if they also have some access to inter-regional transport networks
Remote work carried out in-house or by outsourcing	Selective relocation of office functions that do not depend on face-to-face interaction strengthens the specialisation of city centres; suburban and non-urban localities benefit as locations for back-office functions.	Likely to strengthen current trends in spatial development (eg the shift of second-tier business functions to medium-sized cities, such as found in Germany).	Pockets of high-tech development in low-labour cost countries benefit; but high volatility because jobs are sensitive to relocation as soon as new locations become more attractive.
Call centres	Large lower-skill call centres tend to be located on the periphery of large conurbations, sometimes in converted warehouses in industrial zones. Call centres needing to attract higher skilled or multilingual workers may be located in city centres.	Distribution of jobs in call-centres benefits traditionally disadvantaged regions with low labour costs and good supply of suitable labour.	Call centre jobs favour international low-cost locations with suitable language skills and time zone assignment.

The extent to which eWork has an effect on a given region depends strongly on the diffusion of the different workforms and type of labour market, as well as upon the overall structure and health of the regional economy. Silicon Valley and the City of London are examples of regions where labour markets are significantly affected by telehomeworking, trans-national remote work and electronic labour market matching (Carnoy et al., 1997). In comparison, it appears that eWork plays only a relatively minor role in peripheral regions at present. The extent to which this will change in the future is hard to predict, but there is clearly much scope for all regions to benefit from eWork relocation and growth, as long as regional decision-makers understand the opportunities and barriers they face.

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