Delineating metropolitan areas: Measuring spatial labour market networks through commuting patterns

Abstract

This chapter first discusses the necessity of defining metropolitan areas and current practice in several countries. It argues for the use of a simple algorithm that exploits cross-municipality commuting patterns. Municipalities are aggregated iteratively provided they send a share of their commuters above a given threshold to the rest of a metropolitan area. This algorithm is implemented on Colombian data and its robustness is assessed. Finally, the properties of the resulting spatial labour market networks are explored.