Labor market areas and sectoral specialization: an analysis for Andalusia

The aim of this paper is to identify labor market areas in Andalusia. For doing so we employ data on commuting flows obtained from mobile positioning data published by Spanish National Statistics Institute. In addition, we carry out an analysis of the productive specialization of these labor market areas. The results obtained show the existence of 53 labor market areas in the Andalusian territory, 16 out of them share territory from two different provinces. This fact confirms the need of combining administrative and functional classifications when analyzing the functioning of the labor market and when implementing policy measures. The most common productive specialization pattern in these labor market areas is the agro-industrial one, followed by the combination of three types of activities: manufacturing, construction and traditional services. In contrast, those labor market areas specialized in knowledge intensive services and public services are the least abundant, and concentrate around the capital of the provinces.