| Abstract: | Employment is an important factor in state planning and a variable in both economic activity and population. Multiregional methodologies which incorporate territorial variables in functional type analyses may be used to study the interactions between municipal labor markets, helping identify those that should receive priority assistance in developing their sources of employment. This work uses a gravitational model to analyze interactions between the local labor markets of 17 seats of municipios in the state of Tabasco as demonstrated with data from the census of 1990. The working hypothesis was that alternatives for labor market growth are distributed hierarchically in descending order of supply as a function of the size of the economically active population in each locality, the relative participation of the unemployed in each locality, and the distance between the localities. The modeling of interaction between local labor markets is achieved in three stages. First, a gravitational model is adjusted with restrictions in the origins. The next step requires use of the parameters resulting from the first step to predict the number of trips to each destination, as a function of levels of unemployment in each locality producing trips. The third stage consists of predictive application of a gravitational model restricted in both origin and destination to define the magnitude of flows between each point of origin and each point of destination. The general character of the gravitational model is described for each step. The model suggests that the main interactions between local labor markets at the level of seats of municipios are located in the center of the state. Three municipal seats in particular had great potential for labor market growth. A separate system of labor market interaction was observed in the southern part of the state. The coastal zone did not appear to offer an alternative for labor market growth. |
