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The Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics, (NUTS) for the French nomenclature d'unités territoriales statistiques, is a geocode standard for referencing the administrative divisions of countries for statistical purposes. The standard was developed by the European Union, and thus only covers the member states of the EU in detail (see also: Regions of the European Union). Eurostat also devised a hierarchy for the 10 countries that joined the EU in 2004, but these are subject to minor changes. The NUTS divisions do not necessarily correspond to administrative divisions within the country. The Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics, comprising three levels, are instrumental in European Union's Structural Fund delivery mechanisms.
A NUTS code begins with a two-letter code referencing the country, which is identical to the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code (except UK instead of GB for the United Kingdom). The subdivision of the country is then referred to with one number. A second or third subdivision level is referred to with another number each. Each numbering starts with 1, as 0 is used for the upper level. In case the subdivision has more than 9 entities, capital letters are used to continue the numbering.
In addition to the full three levels for the European Union countries, all countries have a NUTS code with a two-letter code for a continent and two numbers for the country, and for the USA, Canada and Australia the states, provinces, and territories are numbered separately.
There are some anomalies: for example, Gibraltar is listed as being outside the EU with the code EO21; while French Guiana is listed twice, once in France as FR930 and once in South America as AS13.
NUTS is thus in some extent similar to the ISO 3166-2 standard, as well as the FIPS standard of the United States.
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Levels
There are three levels of NUTS defined, with two levels of local administrative units (LAUs) below. These were called NUTS levels 4 and 5 until July 2003, but were officially abolished by regulation, although they are sometimes still described as such. Note that not all countries have every level of division, depending on their size. One of the most extreme cases is Luxembourg, which has only LAUs; the three NUTS divisions each correspond to the entire country itself.
Establishment
The NUTS-region are based on the existing national administrative subdivisions. In countries where only one or two regional subdivisions exist, or where the size of existing subdivisions is too small, a second and/or third level is created. This may be on the first level (ex. France, Italy, Greece, and Spain), on the second (ex. Germany) and/or third level (ex. Belgium).1
In smaller countries, where the entire country would be placed on the NUTS 2 or even NUTS 3 level (ex. Luxembourg, Cyprus, Ireland), levels 1, 2 and/or 3 are identical to the level above and/or to the entire country.
These minimum and maximum thresholds are used for establishing the regions :
| Level | Minimum | Maximum |
|---|---|---|
| NUTS 1 | 3 million | 7 million |
| NUTS 2 | 800 000 | 3 million |
| NUTS 3 | 150 000 | 800 000 |
Examples
- DE: Germany
- DE7: Hesse - The Bundesland as the top level subdivision of Germany
- DE71: Darmstadt region - Regierungsbezirk as second level
- DE71E: Wetteraukreis - Kreis as the third level
- DE71: Darmstadt region - Regierungsbezirk as second level
- DE7: Hesse - The Bundesland as the top level subdivision of Germany
- AA: Asia
- AA25: Thailand
- US16: Kansas
See also
External links
- Correspondence between the NUTS levels and the national administrative units — Eurostat
- NUTS Statistical Regions of Europe — Eurostat
- Hierarchical list of the NUTS (EU-27) — Eurostat
- Hierarchy in EFTA, Accession and Candidate countries — Eurostat
- List of NUTS codes (World Wide) — European Union; copy archived by the Internet Archive
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 19 November 2008, at 22:45.
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