Delineating Functional Areas in All Territories by OECD

Author:OECD
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: regions
Publisher: OECD Publishing
Published: 2020-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

Dutch-German-Belgian cross-border functional areas

In the European Union, freedom of movement of goods, people and labour has led to the emergence of significant transnational commuting flows. Thus, multiple integrated cross-border labour markets have developed over the past decades. Conceptually, the delineation of functional areas can extend beyond the national border. Given the use of functional areas for domestic policy or territorial statistics, countries, however, tend not to consider cross-border flows and identify functional areas only for their national territory.

Including or excluding cross-border commuting flows can have a considerable impact on the configuration of delineated functional areas. As part of an experimental mapping exercise, Statistics Netherlands computed cross-border LMAs at the Dutch-German-Belgian border, a territory characterised by both historically intensive commuting flows and high population density and cross-border economic clusters.

The exercise demonstrated the consequences of ignoring country borders, i.e. of additionally considering cross-border commuting flows (Eurostat, 2017[3]). By including data on employees that are resident in and commute from a foreign region, the exact shape and extent of functional areas changed along the border. For example, considering flows across the Dutch-German border not only generates more logical clusters and gives rise to cross-border LMAs, but it also has large effects on the construction of LMAs inside a country’s boundaries (Figures 3.5 and 3.6). The Statistics Netherlands initiative as well as previous work (Coombes, 1995[11]) indicate the potential benefits of international, cross-border co-operation in terms of data collection and spatial analysis.

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