Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics |
The Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) is a geocode standard for referencing the administrative division 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; Eurostat also devised a hierarchy for the 10
countries which joind 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 acronym is derived from the French name for the scheme,
nomenclature des unités territoriales statistiques.
A NUTS code begins with a two letter code referencing the country, which are identical with the ISO 3166-1 codes (except UK instead of GB for the United Kingdom). The subdivision of countries is then referred with one number, covering the same entities
as the ISO 3166-2 standard. A second or third subdivision level is referred
with another number each. Each numbering starts with 1 as 0 is used for the upper level. In case it has more than 9 entities
capital letters are used to continue the numbering.
Additionally 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 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 with the ISO 3166 standard, as well as the
FIPS standard of the United States.
Levels
There are three levels of NUTS defined, with two levels of local administrative units (LAUs) below that. Note that not all countries have every level of
division. Luxembourg, for example, has only LAUs. The three NUTS divisions each correspond to the entire country itself.
Examples
External links
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