Una analisi critica dei sistemi locali del lavoro individuati dall’ISTAT

The Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) defines the Local Labour Systems (LLS) by aggregating municipalities through a procedure that matches information on place of residence and on job location. This territorial classification, although similar to the British approach, does not seem to meet the requirements of the original paradigm based on districts and metropolitan areas; this discrepancy may induce relevant ambiguities in terms of interpretation of the results. In this paper we compare the LLS proposed by ISTAT for the Marche region in 2001 to an alternative territorial classification that is based on the regular Markov chains theory. The results show that the common criticism on the interpretation of the LLS has not only a theoretical but also an empirical foundation. In particular, the territorial analysis proposed by the LLS seems to provide, in many cases, an insufficient and misleading comprehension of the phenomena of interest.