The study was made possible through a partnership among:

- The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE),
- The Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT),
- The Institut für Landes- und Stadtenwicklungsforschung des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen (ILS)
- and the Institut d'Aménagement et d'Urbanisme de la Région d'Ile-de-France (IAURIF), who co-ordinated the whole project.

One of the aims of the project is to produce comparative data on the economic evolution of the metropolises of north-west Europe. A selection of the data gathered on 14 metropolises is presented in this document. It is original and innovative in that it covers economic regions which were defined using the same criteria with a view to making them as geographically comparable as possible..

The geographical limits adopted for the metropolitan regions, known as the Functional Urban Regions or FURs, correspond to the economic sphere of influence wielded by the central town, that is to say to its labour pool, or, in the case of polycentric regions, to the central towns.
The functional urban regions were defined in 2 stages:

- delimitation of the economic core(s) of the metropolitan area : all the neighbouring towns where the density of employment is greater than 7 jobs per hectare.
- delimitation of the hinterland surrounding the economic core(s): all the neighbouring towns where more than 10% of the resident working population work in the economic core(s).

The data used to define the FURs was obtained from the latest population census available at the time when the project was being launched (January 2000).

Much of the data on the metropolitan regions comes from the Labour Force Surveys carried out each year in each country of the European Union. These surveys are co-ordinated by Eurostat which publishes the results at national level and for the administrative regions at NUTS 2 level. The results of these surveys are presented by Eurostat under the title " European Labour Force Survey ". The statistical definitions are the same for each country and region and consequently the data produced is statistically comparable. However, it should be remembered that the data consists of estimates obtained through household polls. Consequently, we have often chosen to present it in the form of percentages rather than absolute values.

Thanks to the participation of the INSEE in France and the INS in Belgium, Eurostat was able to produce data tabulation from the Labour Force Surveys for the years 1992 to 1999 for the 4 regions of Paris, Lille, Antwerp and Brussels, all the while respecting the limits of the FURs.
For technical reasons, the Statistics Institutes of Ireland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Germany were not able to do the same for the other FURs. They did, however, provide the same data tables as those produced by Eurostat within a geographically delimited area very close to that of the FURs (see details).

We hope that the data presented in this brochure will be useful to all those who would like to gain a better understanding of the macro-economic positioning of one of the regions compared to the others.

Key to reading the graphs:
The positioning of a region is presented in relation to the average of the 14 regions taken together. The average for the 14 regions corresponds to the index 100. The highest and lowest values of the 14 regions also appear on the graph.
Example: the graph for the Paris region