Yesterday we found out about the NUTS region codes update at EUROSTAT. Today I had the chance to dig a little deeper and try to find a workaround for non-matching regional data. So far we’ve got an updated EUROSTAT which looks, in combination with non-updated GISCO geographic data something like this:
The map illustrates the coverage of available regional data in Europe. For testing I’ve chosen an unproblematic regional indicator which is usually available for entire Europe: population 2004 on NUTS3 level.
A verbal description of all region code changes can be found in this document. The map above visualizes most changes (because change = no data available any more).
It used to be possible to cover EU27 (with a few region code tweaks even Romania and Bulgaria), EFTA and candidate countries. Seriously, that’s not my understanding of a successful data update.
However, all overview maps I’ve seen so far (well, only those in the *new directory* of the NUTS documentation) are already updated to NUTS 2006 codes. So there is hope that GISCO updates the downloadable data soon.
Update
The definitive geographical dataset with the new NUTS 2006 boundaries is presently under development. We expect that the data will be ready for downloading before the end of May.