Territorial Analysis with NUTS level 3 data as building block (TASK) Berthold Feldmann Eurostat

Background “Territorial Cohesion” is an additional responsibility of DG REGIO There is an increased need to analyse in detail various geometries of the EU territory So far: Urban Audit allows an analysis of urban areas Missing: the rest of the territory

How can we meet this new policy requirement? For a flexible territorial analysis, it would be very helpful to collect a wide battery of economic and social indicators at NUTS level 3 These statistics would be used as building blocks for computing various aggregates like Urban areas Rural areas Coastal regions Mountainous regions etc

Will the individual NUTS-3 data be published? No! The sample size often does not allow for accurate and reliable figures per NUTS-3 regions Aggregates for various geometries are however possible Hence the NUTS-3 data are just building blocks Data will be stored in a separate safe database

Quality issues Individual NUTS level 3 data from surveys have often a low reliability due to small sample size A common technique to increase reliability is to use 3-year averages this lowers the CV by square root of 3 What is TASK? It is about averaging regions with common characteristics, not “by time” but “by space” There is room to produce reliable and very demanded aggregates without increasing the statistical burden This is exactly the goal of TASK

Starting point: LFS data at NUTS 3 A letter was sent to NSIs in January 2009, asking for the additional information of the NUTS 3 region in the transmitted data The replies were promising: a majority agreed to the Eurostat proposal

Next steps Collect NUTS 3 data also for other domains Demography Education Create a secure database for the confidential data Try the convince the hesitant NSIs of the importance and usefulness of the project

Thank you for your attention! Any questions?