The paper examines the 2001 inter-municipal travel-to-work flows of Greece and delineates the country’s labor market areas (LMAs) on the basis of the 15% commuting threshold. It finds that the LMAs of Athens (3.9 million inhabitants) and Thessaloniki (1.1 million) exceed the homonymous urban planning complexes by 8 and 15 times, respectively. These LMAs along with the LMAs of Patras (245 thousand) and Iraklion (233 thousand) host about half of the country’s total population. Another thirty-eight clusters of municipalities and eight self-contained municipalities of 20-184 thousand inhabitants jointly host a quarter of the country’s population. The picture is complemented by the presence of ten clusters of municipalities and 607 self-contained municipalities with smaller populations. Their dispersal resembles the contours of the country’s idiosyncratic terrain and deviates from the 13 regional and 54 sub-regional administrative divisions employed by the national and EU authorities in order to engage in economic development interventions. This suggests that the employment, unemployment and social cohesion policy-initiatives have to be re-focused accordingly.
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