COMMISSION PLANS NEW TERRITORIAL STATISTICS.

The European Commission has published a draft Regulation setting up a common classification of nomenclature of territorial units for statistics (NUTS). NUTS have existed for several years now without any formal legal status, and there have been recent disputes over changes to the classification between the EU's Statistical Office Eurostat, and Member States' national statistical bodies. At the same time, with an enlarged EU, the number of local and regional communities is set to rise, complicating issues further. NUTS divides each Member State into a NUTS 1 regions, each of which in turn is subdivided into a number of NUTS 2 regions...