Workshop Istat Aula Magna Labour Market Areas: current developments and future use Roma, 16 giugno 2017

1. The future of the LMAs
from the Commission's
perspective
Valeriya Angelova,
Oliver Müller
Eurostat Unit E4
Final Workshop on LMAs, 16 June 2017, Rome

2. Content
• Policy needs of LMAs
• Results of the 2016/2017
grant programme
• Avenue for the future
Harmonisation and transparency

3. Policy needs
• DG REGIO sees the use of LMAs as a way to improve
sub-national employment and GDP data distorted by
administrative boundaries
• DG EMPL considers the LMAs as a useful tool for the
monitoring of policy issues relevant for the European
Pillar of Social Rights and Sustainable Development
Goals such as labour market flows, regional and
cross-country commuting, skills mismatches,
availability of human capital, education mobility,
regional and social cohesion.

4. Policy needs
• DG MOVE sees the LMAs as possibility for road safety
data spatial analysis and needs to introduce
commuting patterns for modelling mobility and
passenger transport demands
• DG MARE is interested in the analysis of maritime
industrial districts as a tool to study the Blue
economy and its development over time
• OECD considers the LMAs as a future area of co-
operation with Eurostat and the MSs

5. Policy needs
• ESPON's stakeholders are interested in better
evidence for functional geographies in the following
areas:
• Collaboration mechanisms;
• New governance models and regulatory frameworks;
• Mobility, transport and energy;
• Housing, labour markets and employment;
• Service provision;

6. Policy needs
• Place based policy making;
• Urban-rural partnership;
• Polycentric development from the local and
regional perspective;
• Regional imbalances;
• Competitiveness and adaptive capacity;

7. Policy needs
• Inclusion of small and medium sized urban areas
as well as characterizing peri-urban areas;
• Major conurbations that form integrated
economies;
• Potential of functional areas vs administrative
willingness/tools to cooperate;
• Cross border functional urban areas.

8. Policy needs
• All stakeholders appreciated the initiative taken by
Eurostat and several MSs to harmonise LMAs
• All stakeholders identified a need to populate a
database with a very limited set of socio-economic
data based on harmonised LMAs
• The main concern – more frequent data is needed
to detect patterns for policy analysis

9. Results of the 2016/2017 grant programme
• The latest version of the R package
LabourMarketAreas v. 3.0 is freely available on Cran
• The processing time is further reduced
• The work has been mostly automated
• Quality measures have been added into the algorithm
• The feasibility of the method has been proved
including the production of cross-border LMAs by
ignoring the national borders

10. LMA’s in the Dutch-German
border region without cross-
border information
LMA’s in the Dutch-German
border region with cross-border
information

11. Results of the 2016/2017 grant programme
• The impact of different data sources (administrative
and Census data) on the LMAs has been studied
• Experimental Labour Market data on LMAs has been
produced and communicated
• E-book and other national publications
• A SAS/IML (Interactive Matrix Language) procedure,
for calling R functions from SAS program has been
drawn up.

12. Results of the 2016/2017 grant programme
• Different technical and methodological issues have
been intensively discussed at several workshops
also with countries not covered by grants
• Detailed guidelines on the workflow will be/are
publicly available
• Open on-line library on the Eurostat Cros portal
containing all related scientific papers, reports,
presentations and scripts

13. Strengths of the LMAs concept
• Broadly applicable concept for policy needs LMAs;
• Common definition and method considered to be
feasible;
• IT tool and guidelines on the working flow publicly
available;
• Flexibility in the parameters’ selection;
• Quality assurance measures behind the model;
• In perspective – full European coverage possible.

14. Weaknesses
• No legal recognition of the LMAs;
• No recommendations for common target size and
self-containment of the LMAs;
• The names of the parameters are considered to
be misleading;
• The concept is sometimes wrongly seen as
elaborated to replace the Functional Urban Areas.

15. Stakeholders consultation
on Eurostat's final report
on the LMAs project
Consultation with the WG: how to
increase the coverage, how to
support the use of LMAs in the NSIs
LMAs legally
recognised as
typology
Outline of a future strategy for LMAs
May/June 2017
October 2017
?

16. How do you see the way forward for
LMAs at national and at EU level?

17. Thank you for the attention!
All related documents are available at Eurostat Collaboration in
Research and Methodology for Official Statistics portal
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cros/content/labour-market-
areas_en
Questions:
ESTAT-REGIO@ec.europa.eu
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/main/home