Suburbanization, employment change and commuting in the Tallinn metropolitan area

Tiit Tammaru, University of Tartu

One of the most important features of spatial population change in many of the East and Central European countries in the 1990s was sub-urbanization. At the same time, one of the most important features of labour market change was related to the increase of unemployment. The aim of the current presentation is to analyze the role of sub-urbanization and unemployment in commuting in Tallinn metropolitan area, Estonia. The paper analyses changes in commuting compared to the late Soviet period, and clarifies the compositional differences between commuters and non-commuters. We use anonymous individual 2000 census data and logistic regression for data analysis. It became evident that people who sub-urbanized in the 1990s were more likely commuters than people who lived in the suburbs at the end of the Soviet period, while high-unemployment areas did not send more commuters to Tallinn compared to low-unemployment areas.