The delimitation and coherence of functional and administrative regions

Abstract

We test whether functional regions in the Netherlands show more labour market coherence between the municipalities included in them than the Dutch administrative regions. It turns out that regional disparities are not significantly smaller within functional than within administrative regions with respect to income level, housing prices, employment rate and unemployment rate. We argue that the numerous functional delimitations of the labour market that have been made for many countries in other studies are only useful for policy making if they clearly outperform the administrative delimitations with respect to some relevant indicators of labour market coherence or regional disparities.