A Proposal to Delineate Metropolitan Areas in Colombia

This paper discusses the need to delineate metropolitan areas and current practice in several countries. It argues for the use of a simple algorithm that examines cross-municipality commuting patterns. Municipalities are aggregated iteratively provided they send a share of their commuters, above a given threshold, to the rest of a metropolitan area. The algorithm is implemented on Colombian data and its robustness is assessed. Finally, the properties of the resulting spatial labor market networks are explored.