Administrative areas are arbitrarily designed and do not necessarily reflect the geographical patterns of socio-economic and labour market activity. Labour market areas (LMAs) are required to analyse spatial labour market activity and provide a framework to guide spatially-explicit employment...

The classical foundations of migration research date from the 1880s with Ravenstein's "Laws of migration", which represent the fi rst comparative analyses of internal migration. While his observations remain largely valid, the ensuing century has seen considerable progress in data collection...