Eurostat Library and Grid
Next to the general data sources, there are also the Eurostat library and the Eurostat database grid that can be referred to for data sets.
Eurostat library
The Eurostat library is a product of Metabolism of Cities’ evaluation of the official Eurostat database, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/data/database, provided by the European Commission, to determine data availability and quality necessary to construct our circularity accounting method.
This very collection, which was deemed most promising due to the nature of it being about the European context, its standardised data collection effort across reporting entities and spanning considerable time frames over many themes, contained 8,037 unique datasets as of June 23, 2020. This database was cleaned up, reviewed and tagged with the help of Metabolism of Cities’ Eurostat manager and imported to the library on March 7, 2021.
Now it can be used to browse the data with the search function and keywords. Especially interesting can be the datasets on NUTS3, as it gives an idea if an economic activity takes place or not and what the numbers of employees are.
Do you want to find out more about the review and tagging process with the Eurostat manager? Please refer to page 44 of the “Sector-Wide Circularity Assessment – Method Development” document.
Eurostat database grid
The Eurostat database grid is a visual representation of the Eurostat library. The grid is the most visible result of the tagging and acts as an overview to illustrate for which layers as well as the six different spatial scales, Eurostat datasets exist and have been tagged. The following colours mean:
- Grey out the row: it is known that no such data is produced by Eurostat.
- Green checkmark: There is a minimum one dataset, while the amount of datasets is also stated next to it.
- Rest of row is blue: there are datasets in a layer
- Row is orange: there is no dataset on any spatial scale.
Do you want to find out more about the rules that were used for making the grid? Please refer to page 45 of the “Sector-Wide Circularity Assessment – Method Development” document.
The grid itself shows that there are quite a number of relevant datasets for some spatial scales and layers, for example on NUTS3 and NUTS2 level and for population, but that there are also considerable gaps. When clicking on any cell which has data, the name of the Eurostat datasets appear and can be retrieved easily by searching on their website.
The Eurostat grid can be used by urban administrations, as a starting point, to guide them to relevant datasets during their data collection process. While some of the CityLoops cities are also considered as “Cities” from a Eurostat perspective, see page 37 of the 45 of the “Sector-Wide Circularity Assessment – Method Development, these cities could directly use these datasets. When datasets are only available at bigger spatial scales, cities can use a relevant downscaling technique to approximate the sought after value at their spatial scale.