Those looking for work in recent years did not necessarily have to move from the region to the Randstad. The number of jobs outside the major cities (and the Eindhoven region) has also increased significantly over the past fifteen years.
Amsterdam remains an exception, the capital is a true job machine.
This is evident from research by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL) into the distribution of jobs across the country and how it has developed in recent years (between 1996 and 2022). It cannot be concluded that the region would become impoverished due to the disappearance of work, the PBL notes. The planning agency sees that the number of jobs has increased in actually all municipalities during the period studied. And the number of available jobs per capita has increased everywhere.
There are caveats to this. For example, the increase in the number of available jobs per inhabitant in some municipalities can be explained by a decrease in the number of inhabitants, rather than an increase in the number of jobs. And the Randstad as a whole may not necessarily be a bigger job magnet than the rest of the Netherlands, but Amsterdam is an exception.
The number of jobs in the capital has grown in every year between 1996 and 2022. “In the Netherlands there is therefore not so much an increasing concentration of jobs in the (Rand) city, but mainly in Amsterdam,” the PBL researchers note. This is mainly due to growth in the financial sector, ‘business services’ and ‘consumer services’.
But apart from Amsterdam, the picture is the same throughout the country. There are municipalities within and outside the Randstad in which the share of the total number of jobs in the Netherlands has increased or decreased. Rotterdam is an example of a large city (in the Randstad) where there are relatively fewer jobs than in 1996.