The singling out of a neighborhood is often a critical point when we wish to employ one of the tools
proposed by spatial statistics. In fact this is directly correlated to the researcher’s hypothesis on
how interactions among territorial units affect the performances of the phenomenon under examination.
The aim of this article is to compare results obtained by different shift-share decompositions
related to the annual variation of regional employment in Friuli Venezia Giulia. Many of the different
spatial weights matrices proposed by literature are here taken into consideration. As in other
contexts, in this paper the interpretation of neighborhood is fundamental. Therefore, we introduce a
specific method to create a neighborhood in order to assign it an explicit territorial meaning.
