The Labour Market Area (LMA) has become a well–established and widely discussed concept in regional geography and statistics. This interesting concept, essential for the creating of typologies modelling real life situations, has been intensively studied in Eurostat’s Working Group on Regional, Urban and Rural Development Statistics, both in two dedicated Task Forces (on harmonised LMAs in 2014/2015 and on LMAs at the European scale in 2018/2019) and as a subject of EU grants in 2016/2017. A number of workshops have been organised with the participation of National Statistical Institutes (NSIs) and the academic community to discuss and solve methodological and IT issues, to develop guidelines on the delineation of LMAs and to exchange knowledge. The aim of this Statistical Working Paper is to demonstrate the wealth of knowledge and experience gained during the period 2014–2019 and to summarise the results of the work done on LMAs, thus defining a basis for further statistical and methodological research and for the application of the concept to national and EU territorial policies. The paper tells the story of the evolution of the concept of LMAs during the joint work of Eurostat and the NSIs. The contents are focused on key LMA related topics such as legal and policy framework for LMAs, methodology, challenges, use cases, link to other territorial classifications and functional geographies. The paper also builds upon the information on methodological activities in the field of the LMAs presented in 2018 at two international conferences co–organised by Eurostat: Quality in Official Statistics held in Krakow, Poland and the Conference of European Statistics Stakeholders held in Bamberg, Germany.

链接地址：http://dx.doi.org/10.2785/328723