Assessing circular migration, formal and informal employment and its spatiotemporal characteristics is a complex methodological and practical task for official statistics.

A combination of various data sources, including official statistics, administrative data, and data from mobile operators, may provide new opportunities for obtaining circular migration, formal and informal employment estimates for the purposes of various levels of government, including the level of city management.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the use of administrative data together with the mobile operators’ data can promptly improve the accuracy and informativeness of statistical indicators of the labor market including formal and informal employment, circular migration, etc. The population and employment in Moscow and in the Moscow agglomeration are the subjects of this paper.

Authors combine several data sources such as the federal administrative data from the Pension Fund of the Russian Federation and the Federal Tax Authority, data from the Moscow city online public services, data from the mobile phone operators, as well as official statistical information provided by Russian Statistic Authority.

The cross-analysis of the data provides important information for the city governance:

estimations of the permanent and temporary population of Moscow and the Moscow agglomeration;

the scale and main directions of the circular migration to and from Moscow and the subsequent delimitation of the real borders of the Moscow agglomeration;

formal and informal employment in the city.

The limits of the data used, as well as recommendations for the incorporating administrative and mobile operators’ data into the system of official statistics and city management, are also discussed in this paper.