Změny v dojížďce za prací v období transformace : komparace lokálních trhů práce

• Title in English: Changes in travel to work during the period of economic transformation : comparison of local labour market areas
• Authors: TONEV Petr
• Year of publication: 2013
• MU Faculty or unit: Faculty of Economics and Administration
• Description: This dissertation deals with changes in a spatial organisation of daily travel-to-work in the Czech Republic during the period of transformation. The data on travel-to-work from the 1991 and 2001 censuses were entered into the analysis and they were refined at a very detailed resolution with respect to the influence of administrative and methodical changes (definition of economically active population etc.) so that they were maximally comparable. Functional regions, so called local labour market areas) were delineated for both compared time horizons in order to capture changes in the spatial organisation of travel-to-work flows. Unlike the preceding long-lasting practice in the Czech Republic that had favoured relatively simple deductive approach for regionalisation of travel-to-work a simplified and adjusted variant of the CURDS algorithm (Coombes et al. 1986) was employed. It had been used in Britain since the 1980s and successively in a number of other countries and it was acknowledged by Eurostat as a standard in this field. Unlike the preceding studies concerned with the period of transformation (Hampl 2005 and Sýkora and Mulíček 2009) only daily travel-to-work flows were analysed. The application of the method with comparable parameters produced 198 local labour market areas for 1991 and 193 for 2001 – 11 areas out of the original count were dissolved and 6 new were identified. Most remaining areas did in fact change in their delineation, particularly in relation to the success in transformation of local/regional economy, but generally these changes were relatively little important and the spatial organisation of daily travel-to-work flows during the period of transformation can be considered as relatively stable. The comparison of local labour market areas proved also an increasing commuting distance, which is shown in lower self-containment of the areas and it also confirmed the findings of the preceding studies regarding the concentration tendencies – increasing importance of strong regions and decreasing importance of smaller regions. Keeping this trends going on further decrease in a number of local labour market areas can be expected, which is in accordance with development of other advanced economies. Even if not always are the methods introduced in a particular environment transferable to another without problems, the application of the adjusted and simplified variant of the CURDS algorithm provides geographically relevant results even in relatively specific conditions of the Czech settlement system and it can extend methodological apparatus used in regional analyses of the Czech territory. Thanks to relatively high sensitivity to unnatural deviations in the data used it can be applied for corrections of source data and for achieving more precise results.