Labour Market Areas for territorial policies: Tools for a European approach

Labour Market Areas (LMAs) are regions built on the basis of commuting to work data so that the majority of the labour force lives and works within their boundaries. LMAs have long being recognised as relevant for assessing the effectiveness of local policy decisions. Eurostat encourages LMA development in the European Union. The idea is to share methods and tools towards the creation of a harmonised geography. As the LMA functional approach to territorial partitioning is getting more and more used for policy purposes, the demand for indicators is increasing. The paper illustrates the shared method, the recently publicly available software package LabourMarketAreas developed at Istat for LMA design. The paper also presents examples of indicators at LMA level built from register data. Finally the small area estimation method implemented by Istat to release employment and unemployment rates at this geographical level is sketched.