Living on the move: disentangling the interregional commuting patterns in Europe

The geographic mobility of workers is a good indicator of labour-market integration and existing imbalances. European policies aimed at reducing administrative barriers and improving transport infrastructure intend to promote interregional labour mobility. However, reliable data on how labour-market integration evolves over time remains limited. This paper presents a new methodology to construct a dataset on regional labour flows at the NUTS (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics)-2 level within the EU27 + EEA (European Economic Area) from 2010 to 2018. The reliability of the dataset is assessed by comparing it with multiple external indicators, including survey-based commuting data, transport flows and social connectivity measures. Cluster analysis reveals seven distinct regional typologies of labour mobility, highlighting the substantial heterogeneity among European NUTS-2 regions. Finally we estimate a set of fractional regression models to analyse the determinants of intra-regional commuting shares.