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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. Thank you for your attention!
Any questions?