NUTS. What is it? How does this relate to keep.eu?
The NUTS regions are defined by Eurostat.
The Nomenclature of territorial units for statistics, abbreviated NUTS (from French Nomenclature des Unités Territoriales Statistiques) is a geographical nomenclature subdividing the economic territory of the European Union (EU) into regions at three different levels (NUTS 1, 2 and 3 respectively, moving from larger to smaller territorial units). Above NUTS 1, there is the ‘national’ level of the Member States. The NUTS is based on Regulation (EC) No 1059/2003 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 May 2003 on the establishment of a common classification of territorial units for statistics (NUTS), which is regularly updated.
According to the NUTS system, each country (or NUTS0 region, as mentioned in keep.eu for convenience) is sub-divided into:
- NUTS1: Major socio-economic regions (one NUTS1 area typically contains several NUTS2 areas);
- NUTS2: Basic regions for the application of regional policies (one NUTS2 area typically contains several NUTS3 areas);
- NUTS3: Small regions for specific diagnoses.
Besides Eurostats’s NUTS, for countries not covered by this system, keep.eu uses other sources. To learn more please refer to the FAQ entry on geocoding.
Keep.eu follows closely the updates made by Eurostat to the NUTS regions. Every time Eurostat publishes a new update, keep.eu updates its geographic definitions accordingly.
In general, only the current version of the NUTS system is used in keep.eu. All the previous ones are discarded. FAQ entry on geocoding contains an explanation of how each partner/partnership and each programme are made part of this system.