“Statec regularly publishes data with the country’s employment figures, or the population census. But what we wanted to do with this publication was to provide a real response to the concept of spatial planning. This is the first time that we have used data from the Luxembourg Inland Revenue, Statec and Dater (Département de l’aménagement du territoire) all at the same time,” says Frédéric Durand, a researcher at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (Liser) in the urban development and mobility department. Published and presented to the press on Monday 12 May, the publication “L’emploi des actifs occupés au Luxembourg” is the latest issue in Dater’s “Des cartes et des chiffres,” series, part of the work of the Territorial Development Observatory, formerly known as the Spatial Development Observatory.

“We have had access to detailed, spatial information. We went down to municipal level. It took three Liser researchers almost six months to complete, in addition to our other day-to-day research work,” continues Antoine Decoville, a researcher in the urban development and mobility department. “It’s a file of 500,000 people, dating from 2023, that we had to clean up and put into a geographic system. The only minor downside was that we were unable to analyse the situation of the 15,000 or so international and European civil servants, as they are not included in the tax administration’s data.”

A 44% increase in the number of jobs in 13 years

One of the main findings of the study is that Luxembourg is the European champion in terms of the number of jobs per inhabitant. “The very strong growth observed in the number of jobs in the country was even faster than the growth in the number of inhabitants in relative terms. The number of jobs has grown by 44% in just 13 years. The ratio of jobs per resident is even 1.22 for the conurbation of Luxembourg City (which covers ten municipalities including the country's capital, but also Bertrange, Leudelange and Niederanven) for 251,680 jobs. That’s more than half the jobs in the country, 42.1% of which are occupied by cross-border commuters,” adds Decoville.

Luxembourg City alone accounts for 28% of the total number of cross-border commuters in the country, or 62,295 people. The southern region, for example, accounts for 91,225 jobs, giving a ratio of 0.5 jobs per resident--“within the European average”--but 50.45% of jobs are held by cross-border commuters. In the Nordstad there are 15,275 jobs, a ratio of 0.62, and 22.57% of jobs are occupied by cross-border commuters.

70% of residents of Luxembourg City work there

Luxembourg City is the municipality with the highest proportion of working people employed in their municipality of residence: almost seven out of ten people. This is due to the very high concentration of employment in the capital. It stands out radically from the country’s other municipalities, as only six have a rate higher than the national average (24.3%): these are Wiltz, Echternach, Vianden, Weiswampach, Esch-sur-Alzette and Clervaux. They have a rate of employed residents living and working in the municipality of between 25% and 30%, a far cry from the 70% seen in Luxembourg City.

In 2023, the country had 216,522 cross-border workers and 18,343 workers declared abroad, i.e., 47% of total employment. “These workers declared abroad are either future residents or future cross-border commuters who have not yet regularised their situation, or people who come to work in Luxembourg on an ad hoc basis,” explains Valérie Feltgen.

A little more than one resident in two resides in France. More specifically, the main emitting centres are the conurbation communities of Thionville (18,000 employed workers), Longwy (14,891), Val de Fensch (11,801) and the Pays Haut Val d’Alzette (10,137). Trier, in Germany, meanwhile, counts 10,346 cross-border commuters.

Reducing the need to travel

Researchers have analysed the average home-to-work distances of employed workers in 2023, “based solely on simulations of journeys by car, i.e., with theoretical kilometres, based on the place of residence and the place of work,” notes Decoville. “Cross-border commuters cover distances almost three times greater--on average--than Luxembourg residents. For workers residing in Germany, the average distance is 48 kilometres; for those in Belgium it is 53.9 kilometres; for those in France it is 44.7 kilometres; and for residents of Luxembourg it is 16.7 kilometres, giving an average--for all the 481,638 workers counted in 2023--of 30.6 kilometres per journey.” That’s 61.2 hypothetical kilometres for a round trip.

One of the conclusions drawn by the Liser team is to “reduce the need to commute by encouraging teleworking or creating coworking spaces, to promote a functional mix in new neighbourhoods to enable people to live and work close to each other, or to relocate jobs that may lend themselves to this (particularly public sector jobs) to secondary urban centres, to relieve the pressure on the capital,” explains Durand.

This article was originally published in .