ABSTRACT
Limburg is one of the twelve provinces of the Netherlands; it is the most southern province and covers an area of about 2,200 square kilometres, with a population of about 1.1 million. Limburg borders the German Land of North Rhine-Westphalia to the east, the Flandrian province of Limburg to the west and the Walloon province of Liège to the south. Until the 1960s South Limburg was a peripheral mining region, and with the closure of the mines the region faced high unemployment rates. In the ten years from 1965 to 1975, more than 44,000 miners lost their jobs and 30,000 jobs were lost in related industries. Large programmes initiated a long and successful restructuring of the Limburg economy. Since the late 1970s, Limburg has seen a strong economic revival, with unemployment falling since 1984, to the point where the unemployment rate was 8 per cent in 1997.
