Page 349 - Contributed Paper Session (CPS) - Volume 4

CPS2259 Florabela Carausu et al.
specified line or target, they have to measure the extent to which different
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people are being included in the rate of progress’
Leave no one behind slogan links to the local community (the individuals),
but as well to territorial capital. Therefore, the approach should be the same
as when shifting from regional policy to territorial cohesion; i.e. the
development approach should be characterised by a focus on the use of
endogenous potentials and territorial targeting, promoting the creating of
functional and spatial structures (i.e. functional areas).
The concept of functional areas may be ambiguous, and it appeared rather
as a targeted alternative, than as concrete solution. Maybe the most well-
known conceptualised functional areas are the Functional Urban Areas (FUA)
and Labour Market Areas (LMA).
FUA have been developed by OECD in collaboration with the European
Commission (DG REGIO and Eurostat). A harmonised definition of the urban
areas as ‘functional economic units’, overcoming the limitation linked to the
administrative units, has been developed by the two institutions. The
methodology used to identify the FUAs chooses as building blocks the
smallest administrative units for which national commuting data are available.
The methodology is applied to 29 OECD countries. The OECD metropolitan
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database publishes a set of annual variables related to some of the OECD
functional urban areas with a population above 500 000.
Labour Market Areas are defined as functional areas defined based on the
patterns of commuting, similar to FUA, but not limited to major cities and their
immediate regions.
10
The LMA approach has been investigated by Eurostat with the support
of researchers, and the proposed LMA methodology has been tested by
several EU Member States through grants. The initiative targeted the definition
of consistently defined LMAs covering the entire territory of the EU.
Preliminary initiatives at national level showed that some EU MS had defined
LMAs for guiding policy actions to improve regional economic structures, for
defining industrial districts, for the dissemination of socio-economic statistics
at lower spatial scales or for improving public transport provision, among
others.

3. Result
The fact that the selection of the functional area is key for the efficiency of
the policy in question, and sensitive for the comparison of results, allows
arguing that there isn’t any standard set of areas that is ideal for all type of

8 idem
9 http://measuringurban.oecd.org/
10 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cros/content/labour-market-areas_en
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