Problems of delimitation of labour market regions according to exact district boundaries, and a comparison of functional labour market delimitations

Abstract

"Where it is a question of portraying spatial economic processes as accurately as possible, both in the area of regional sciences and in regional politics, the delimitation of functional spatial units is of central importance. The current study compares two different methodical approaches which delimit regional labour markets on the basis of commuter networks in Germany: firstly the delimitation of labour market regions by Kropp and Schwengler (2008) using graph theory and, secondly, the delimitation of regional labour markets according to Eckey, Kosfeld and Türck (2006) via factor analysis. Both procedures are calculated on the basis of district and community data and the results subsequently compared with one another. The graph theory produces as its best result 51 labour market regions that are very heterogeneous in size in comparison to the rather homogenously-sized 150 regional labour markets resulting from factor analysis. Here the differences in the results of the delimitation are due less to the basic regional units of the district or community but rather to the type of delimitation procedure chosen. From an analytical perspective, better quality results are clearly achieved via the former procedure, however the large regions do combine very differing partial labour markets. In the case of the smaller regional markets identified using factor analysis on the other hand, it is debatable whether these really do represent independent economic units and whether they ought not to be connected up to larger labour market regions." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))

Cite article

Kropp, P. & Schwengler, B. (2011): Probleme der kreisscharfen Abgrenzung von Arbeitsmarktregionen und ein Vergleich von funktionalen Arbeitsmarktabgrenzungen. In: C. Dreger, R. Kosfeld & M. Türck (Hrsg.) (2011): Empirische Regionalforschung heute : Festschrift für Professor Hans-Friedrich Eckey, p. 195-211.