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Automatic delimitation of labour market areas based on multi-criteria optimisation: The case of Spain 2011

Author

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  • Lucas Martínez-Bernabéu

    (International Economics Institute, University of Alicante, Spain)

  • José Manuel Casado-Díaz

Abstract

Labour market areas (LMAs) are a type of functional region (FR) defined on commuting flows and used in many countries to serve as the territorial reference for regional studies and policy making at local levels. Existing methods rely on manual adjustments of the results to ensure high quality, making them difficult to be monitored, hard to apply to different territories, and onerous to produce in terms of required work-hours. We propose an approach to automatise all stages of the delineation procedure and improve the final results, building upon a state-of-the-art stochastic search procedure that ensures optimal allocation of municipalities/counties to LMAs while keeping good global indicators: a pre-processing layer clusters adjoining municipalities with strong commuting flows to constrain the initial search space of the stochastic search, and a multi-criteria heuristic corrects common deficiencies that derive from global maximisation approaches or simple greedy heuristics. It produces high quality LMAs with optimal local characteristics. To demonstrate this methodology and assess the improvement achieved, we apply it to define LMAs in Spain based on the latest commuting data.

Suggested Citation

  • Lucas Martínez-Bernabéu & José Manuel Casado-Díaz, 2022. "Automatic delimitation of labour market areas based on multi-criteria optimisation: The case of Spain 2011," Environment and Planning B, , vol. 49(2), pages 654-670, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:envirb:v:49:y:2022:i:2:p:654-670
    DOI: 10.1177/23998083211021104
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. José Manuel Casado-Díaz & Lucas Martínez-Bernabéu & Francisco Rowe, 2017. "An evolutionary approach to the delimitation of labour market areas: an empirical application for Chile," Spatial Economic Analysis, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 12(4), pages 379-403, October.
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    4. Christopher S Fowler & Leif Jensen, 2020. "Bridging the gap between geographic concept and the data we have: The case of labor markets in the USA," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 52(7), pages 1395-1414, October.
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    6. Yao Shen & Michael Batty, 2019. "Delineating the perceived functional regions of London from commuting flows," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 51(3), pages 547-550, May.
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