INGOLSTADT, GERMANY — More than a quarter of the work force in Spain or Greece is without jobs, but this city on the Danube north of Munich has the opposite problem: not enough workers.


Patrick Schulter, 21, weighed three offers recently before choosing a work-study training program at Schabmüller Automobiltechnik, which makes components for Audi and other vehicle manufacturers.


He is not unusual. One of his fellow Schabmüller trainees, 18-year-old Rebecca Hartl, said “None of my friends have any problem getting a job.”


Ingolstadt, with a population of 128,000, provides perhaps the best example of the turnaround that has occurred in the German job market since an overhaul of labor regulations in 2005. Unemployment in Ingolstadt and the surrounding region is just 2.2 percent, the lowest rate in the country. In Eichstätt, a neighboring town, the jobless rate is an almost impossibly low 1.3 percent.


The changes that helped create full employment, and then some, in parts of Germany are often held up as an example that other European countries should emulate.


And yet, as many low-paid Germans would attest, employment and affluence are not necessarily synonymous — as the country’s growing income gap makes clear. Nor are all of those jobs necessarily secure. What is more, a visit to Ingolstadt shows that the low jobless rate is also a result of factors that may not be so easy to duplicate elsewhere.


Even Germany is not immune to Europe’s economic problems. The Ifo business climate index, considered a reliable gauge of the mood in German industry, fell for a fifth month in September, according to data released Monday by the Ifo Institute in Munich. German managers are concerned that the euro zone crisis is depriving them of sales in other parts of Europe.


Like companies all over Germany, though, those in Ingolstadt have prospered from exports beyond Europe — to emerging markets and a general surge in the number of affluent consumers worldwide. Volkswagen’s Audi unit, which is based in Ingolstadt and is by far the biggest employer, now sells more of its high-end cars in China than in Germany or the United States.


The effects of the labor reforms are impossible to disentangle from the results of sound corporate strategy. “It’s hard to say because at the same time the economy recovered,” said Thomas Sigi, a member of the management board at Audi who is in charge of personnel. “German industry prepared itself at the right time for emerging markets.”


Since 2005, when the revamp in labor laws took effect, the jobless rate in Germany has fallen from 13 percent to less than 7 percent. A big factor was a steep cut in jobless benefits that put pressure on people to take even low-wage jobs, and changes that made it easier for companies to hire temporary workers with fewer protections against dismissal.


That is why the country’s job miracle is regarded with curious ambivalence by many Germans. It came at the expense of the comfortable but costly social benefits many Germans treasured.


People had to give up the security of a guaranteed long-term income if they became unemployed. They faced more pressure to take jobs they did not want. Even better-paid workers had to make do with meager pay raises.


As a result, labor costs in Germany have barely budged in the past decade. The wage restraint helped German companies become more competitive on world markets, preventing the loss of manufacturing jobs to Eastern Europe or China. But it also created a bigger gap between rich and poor.


Gerhard Schröder, the chancellor who pushed through the changes in labor rules in the face of bitter opposition within his own center-left party, subsequently lost a re-election bid to Angela Merkel. He has since become a figure of some ridicule because of his business ties to the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin.