Francisco Rowe presented Mobile Phone Data for Cross-border Population & Expenditure Flows: Ideas & Challenges at the workshop “Measurement of the flows across the internal borders of the European Union”, hosted by the European Commission Joint Research Centre on 14 May 2025.
The workshop brought together experts to discuss new ways to measure mobility, labour and service flows across internal European Union borders. The talk discussed the use of mobile phone data to estimate cross-border population and expenditure flows, focusing on methodological opportunities and practical challenges for robust measurement.
Mobile phone data offer a promising source for understanding cross-border movements at fine spatial and temporal scales, but their use requires careful attention to coverage, representativeness, validation, data governance and interpretability. These issues are closely connected to the aims of DEBIAS: developing transparent approaches to assess and correct biases in digital trace data used to study human mobility.
More information about the workshop is available from the European Commission newsroom: Measuring Cross-Border Flows: JRC Workshop Insights.
