National Institute of Statistics Romania

Public Policies Unit

Libertatii Bdv. Nr. 16, Sector 5, 050706, Bucharest, Romania

Data on European cities were collected in the Urban Audit project, in the Large City Audit project, Data collection for sub-national statistics (mainly cities) project. The projects' ultimate goal is to contribute towards the improvement of the quality of urban life: it supports the exchange of experience among European cities; it helps to identify best practices; it facilitates benchmarking at the European level and provides information on the dynamics within the cities and with their surroundings.

Diseminated data:

Population on 1 January by age groups and sex - City, LUZ and National level.

Population structure - City, LUZ and National level.

Population by citizenship and country of birth - National level.

Fertility and mortality - City, LUZ and National level.

Living conditions - National level.

Education - City, LUZ and National level.

Culture and tourism - City, LUZ and National level.

Labour market - National level.

Economy and finance - National level.

Travel Patterns - City, LUZ and National level.

Water - City and National level.

Specific classification and coding systems have been developed for the spatial units and for the variables and indicators of the Urban Audit project.

Classification system for the spatial units

The city code consists of a 2-digit country code, a 3-digit city code and a final C for Central City - for LUZ(FUA) an L is used and for SCD a D.

Each Sub-City district will have the city code plus a unique number afterwards to identify the individual Sub-City District within the city. Thus, each sub-city unit will have a unique code.

In the Urban Audit, some cities have 2 sub-city levels. For this reason, 5 extra positions are used for sub-cities. The total length of the sub-city code is 11 characters.

Classification system for the UA variables

A variable is the raw data collected by the national statistical offices of the countries. The variable data serves as the raw data for the calculation of the indicators. The variables serve as either the numerator or denominator of the indicator equation, depending on how this has been defined.

Classification system for the UA indicators

Indicators are labelled in a similar way to variables, except that the names end with an I to identify them as indicators.

For examples on these classifications please refer to the UA reference metadata.

The indicators and variables cover several aspects of quality of life, for e.g. demography, nationality, household structure, housing, health, labour market, income disparity and poverty, economic activity, education and training provision, water, travel patterns and culture and recreation and tourism.

For the complete list of indicators and variables see the Urban Audit Reference Metadata.

For most of the indicators, existing international standards have been followed as far as possible.

Detailed information on concepts and definitions used are available from the Methodological manual on city statistics.

Some differences are related to the population data DE10XXV: 

City statistics definition - Population at its usual residence at the reference date. ‘Usual residence’ means the place where a person normally spends the daily period of rest, regardless of temporary absences for purposes of recreation, holidays, visits to friends and relatives, business, medical treatment or religious pilgrimage or, in default, the place of legal or registered residence.

NIS - Romania definition - Permanent resident population represents the number of persons with Romanian citizenship and permanent residence on the territory of Romania, delimited by territorial-administrative criteria. The person's permanent residence is the address where he/she declares to have the main dwelling, printed as such on its identity card and registered by the administrative bodies of the State. To set up the value of this indicator, the usual residence is not taken into account as well as the period and/or reason of absence from domicile.

Some differences are also related to the SA1001V Housing data at city level: 

City statistics definition - The household concept used in this chapter is consistent with the private household definition. A building is defined in this context as any independent structure containing one or more dwellings, rooms or other spaces, covered by a roof and enclosed within external walls or dividing walls which extend from the foundations to the roof, whether designed for residential or for agricultural, commercial, industrial or cultural purposes or for the provision of services. Thus a building may be a detached dwelling, apartment building, factory, shop, warehouse, garage, barn, etc.

NIS - Romania definition - The data available at NIS Romania represents the number of dwellings, not the number of conventional dwellings. According to our methodology the definition for the dwelling is the construction, made up by one or more habitation rooms situated at the same floor of the building or at different floors, generally endowed with outhouses (kitchen, bathroom) or with other service spaces, functionally independent, with separated entrance from the staircase hall, yard or street and which has been built, transformed or arranged with a view to be used, in principle, by a single household.

In the Urban Audit data is collected for cities.

The selection of participating towns / cities and the definition of the composition of the LUZ and the SCD in terms of spatial units need to respect certain criteria set by DG Regional Policy and Eurostat and those concerning statistical quality in general:

• the participating towns / cities in each country should represent about 20% of the population in that country;
• the participating towns / cities should reflect a good geographical distribution within the country (peripheral, central);
• coverage should include more medium-sized towns / cities than was the case in the Urban Audit Pilot Phase (medium-sized towns / cities are defined as having a population of between 50.000 - 250.000 inhabitants; large towns / cities are defined as >250.000);
• there should be comparability of data to enable comparative analysis between towns / cities;
• data should be available.

This "sampling" procedure for the Urban Audit project was carefully and specifically designed by Eurostat, DG REGIO, the National Statistical Offices and the towns / cities in the countries. The final selection of participating towns / cities in the Urban Audit was a compromise between all aspects.

The Large City Audit involves all "non-Urban Audit cities" with more than 100,000 inhabitants in the EU. The list of participating cities was agreed bilaterally with the Member States.

The collection of statistical data is carried out for a defined number of variables for:

• 35 cities from Romania - URBAN AUDIT - respectively, Bucureşti, Cluj-Napoca, Timişoara, Craiova, Brăila, Oradea, Bacău, Arad, Sibiu, Târgu Mureş, Piatra Neamţ, Călăraşi, Giurgiu, Alba Iulia, Constanţa, Iaşi, Galaţi, Braşov, Ploieşti, Piteşti, Baia Mare, Buzău, Satu Mare, Botoşani, Râmnicu Vâlcea, Suceava, Drobeta-Turnu Severin, Focşani, Târgu Jiu, Tulcea, Târgovişte, Slatina, Bârlad, Roman and Bistrita.

Data were provided at city level, LUZ (larger urban zones) and national level.

The availability of the variables, varies.

For some of the variables, data is available from 2005 to 2018.

For some variables, data are also provided for 1992, 1996 (historical data), 2001 and 2004, as requested by Eurostat.

Not applicable.

The unit of measurement varies from indicator to indicator; from variable to variable. In most cases the unit of measurement is included in the label.

The Sub-national statistics on NUTS3 and city level project involved a collection of statistical data for the reference years 2013-2014.

Data collection for sub-national statistics (mainly cities) project involved collection of statistical data for the reference years 2015-2016. This project ended in august 2018 by presenting the data in a publication published on the NSI website: http://www.insse.ro/cms/ro/content/audit-urban .

Sub-National statistics project involved collection of statistical data for the reference years 2017-2018. This project is currently under implementation.

Visit the Portal to European Union Law.

All data supply of urban statistics is based on a voluntary agreement, as there is no Community legislation yet on this topic http://eur-lex.europa.eu/en/index.htm.

Not applicable.

Regulation (EC) No 223/2009 on European statistics (recital 24 and Article 20(4)) of 11 March 2009 (OJ L 87, p. 164), stipulates the need to establish common principles and guidelines ensuring the confidentiality of data used for the production of European statistics and the access to those confidential data with due account for technical developments and the requirements of users in a democratic society.

Not applicable.

Not available.

Not available.

Not available.

The periodicity of the data is 2 - years. A few indicators are collected annually.

The database is updated continually (on average quarterly) depending on the data availability of new and revised data.

Leaflet every 2 years with general informations (in Romanian language).

Urban Audit Leaflet available in .pdf format and NIS Romania website. 

Publication every 2 years with general data (in Romanian language).

Urban Audit Publication available in .pdf (acrobat) format and NIS Romania website. 

Not available.

Not available.

Not available.

The definitons of the Methodological Manual on City Statistics have been followed. Some minor differences exist related to the population data at city level and housing. 

City statistics definition - Population at its usual residence at the reference date. ‘Usual residence’ means the place where a person normally spends the daily period of rest, regardless of temporary absences for purposes of recreation, holidays, visits to friends and relatives, business, medical treatment or religious pilgrimage or, in default, the place of legal or registered residence.

NIS - Romania definition - Permanent resident population represents the number of persons with Romanian citizenship and permanent residence on the territory of Romania, delimited by territorial-administrative criteria. The person's permanent residence is the address where he/she declares to have the main dwelling, printed as such on its identity card and registered by the administrative bodies of the State. To set up the value of this indicator, the usual residence is not taken into account as well as the period and/or reason of absence from domicile.

Some differences are also related to the SA1001V Housing data at city level: 

City statistics definition - The household concept used in this chapter is consistent with the private household definition. A building is defined in this context as any independent structure containing one or more dwellings, rooms or other spaces, covered by a roof and enclosed within external walls or dividing walls which extend from the foundations to the roof, whether designed for residential or for agricultural, commercial, industrial or cultural purposes or for the provision of services. Thus a building may be a detached dwelling, apartment building, factory, shop, warehouse, garage, barn, etc.

NIS - Romania definition - The data available at NIS Romania represents the number of dwellings, not the number of conventional dwellings. According to our methodology the definition for the dwelling is the construction, made up by one or more habitation rooms situated at the same floor of the building or at different floors, generally endowed with outhouses (kitchen, bathroom) or with other service spaces, functionally independent, with separated entrance from the staircase hall, yard or street and which has been built, transformed or arranged with a view to be used, in principle, by a single household.

Compilation of a final operational report - NUAC has elaborated a final operational report, that describe the implementation of the pre-established timetable action and a technical report. The final operational report contains metadata for each variable transmited to Eurostat.

There are in place hierarchical and logical quality checks. Also starting from Data collection for sub-national statistics (mainly cities) project all data are checked and validated using EDIT Validation Tool from Eurostat. 

Recommendations for improvements

For some of the variables, although data is available, the Urban Audit methodology doesn't match the methodology used for data compilation. The data collected by NIS Romania is harmonized with the EU Regulations that govern the European Statistical System and so should be the Urban Audit data compilation methodology.

NIS Romania could establish estimation methodologies at city level for some of the missing variables, but the use of the data will be limited at national level, because there are no harmonized methodologies, which will considerably limit the comparability of the data at EU level.

The deviations in the definitions, in some cases, are caused by lack of EU Regulations governing that domain. 

For the variables that are missing, it is required to introduce new surveys or identify new administrative sources or national registers that could be used to compile the required variables. NIS is trying to implement new surveys, each year, but due to budgetary and financial restrictions it might be difficult to produce new data.

Although, some variables can be found in national registers (like Cadastral Register), they don't always correspond to the methodology used in the Urban Audit project. Estimating variables from those sources might be possible using multiple administrative data source, but the quality of the data will suffer and variables will be unreliable.

Some improvements should be made to the data quality control. Although, the tests are correct some errors might occur especially when using the Multi-Variate type of control and the indicator value tests.

In order to analyze the quality of the data, "quality profiles" should be established for each variable and/or domain, containing data on availability by country, data source by country, EU Regulations and the level of which the data are requested by the Regulation (governing the domains and variables) and methods used to produce data (estimation, exhaustive survey, sample survey etc.).

The Urban Audit project, a co-operative venture between the Directorate General for Regional Policy and Eurostat, is to be viewed in the context of the European Union's regional policy. The main priority of this policy is to improve social and economic cohesion in the EU by seeking to reduce disparities between European regions.

The general objective of the Urban Audit Project is to build a database with statistical information for selected cities for the use by European Commission, in particular the Directorate General for Regional Policy.

Not available.

After completing the tasks of the Sub-national statistics (please refer to section 18.3 for a short description of these tasks), the state of art regarding data delivery for Romania is:

• Out of the 134 variables in the Sub-national statistics Project, NIS Romania was able to compile 46 variables at different levels;
• 44 variables have been delivered at the city level;
• 44 variables have been delivered at the larger urban zone;
• 46 variables have been delivered at the national level.

The relative low number of variables sent is due to the fact that some of the variables are not yet available.

Not applicable.

Not applicable.

Not applicable.

Depends on the domain and individual indicator. As a general rule, timeliness is about 24 months.

Compilation of variables for the reference year 2013 - May 2015.

Compilation of variables for the reference year 2014 - January 2016.

Compilation of variables for the reference year 2015 - May - June 2017.

Compilation of variables for the reference year 2016 - Ianuary - february 2018.

Compilation of variables for the reference year 2017 - August - September 2018. Some of the data for the reference year 2017 will be available in Ianuary 2019. 

Compilation of variables for the reference year 2018 - August - September 2019. Some of the data for the reference year 2017-2018 will be available in Ianuary 2020.

The approach of collecting data from existing sources makes it difficult and sometimes impossible to achieve comparability of variables over the entire "population". The National Urban Audit Coordinators did their best to achieve comparability of urban data, at least within their own country. Wherever it was not possible, attempts were made to estimate the data; where this has been achieved it is noted in the database with a flag.

Due to the sometimes deviating definitions and different data sources used, the comparability of data is limited to some extent. Detailed information is available from the Methodological manual on city statistics or upon request.

For more information please refer to the UA reference metadata.

For the cities included into the data collection after 2004 no data for 1991 and 1996 were collected. For 1991 to 1996 (historical data) only a subset of the indicators are available.

Data collected at sub-national level is coherent with the data collected at national level to a limited extent due to the different data sources used.

Variables DE10XXV are from a different data source than variables DE20XXV and DE30XXV.

Internal coherence (e.g. between spatial levels, between indicators like total, male, female population) is ensured through the application of multivariable and univariable validation controls.

Not available.

No preliminary data is published.

As the coverage of Urban data is very extensive, it cannot be excluded that errors exist in the data. Detected errors will be corrected after consultation with the national coordinator.

The data is compiled from statistical surveys and administrative data sources.

The data is collected on an yearly basis.

National Institute of Statistics (NIS) - Romania has carried out the Urban Audit project in co-operation with the territorial statistical offices from the Urban Audit cities. A National Urban Audit Coordinator (NUAC) was appointed by the National Institute of Statistics.

In order to carry out the work for the Urban Audit, the NUAC has created a working group, containing experts from the specialized directorates of the NIS, according to the tasks developed, and specialists from the 34 territorial statistical offices, who coordinated the work of the respective offices.

Regarding the data collection, the variables existing in the NIS databases were compiled by the experts from specialized directorates. Both experts from NIS and from the territorial statistical offices took care of the collection of statistics that were not available in the NIS. The estimation of the remaining variables implied a very close cooperation between the experts in the working group, from NIS and territorial statistical offices, in order to estimate the remaining variables based on the available close enough data or based on related definitions.

 Timetable of the project 

I: Assessment of feasibility of harmonisation

 Action 1 - Explore the national methodologies and data sources and their coherence with the improved glossary (including variable and spatial unit definitions) and ESS guidelines.

Action 2 - Develope and improve the national methodology and guidelines to be compatible with the current legal frameworks, ESS guidelines and the improved glossary.

Action 3 - Ensure full consistency between the data collected in the frame of this project and the data available at the upper NUTS levels and country level collected by Eurostat.

Action 4 – Draw up a report indicating the extent of harmonisation with European definitions and information on data definitions where harmonisation is not feasible.

II: Provision of statistics on sub-national level

 Action 1 - Compile the variables according to the annex A for the different spatial units (city, functional urban area and national level) for reference years 2017 and 2018.

Action 2 – Provide documentation on the methods applied in the case of estimate missing data .

Action 3 - Thoroughly check and validate the compiled data by using the EDIT tool provided by Eurostat.

Action 4 – Fulfill the complete consistency between the data collected in the frame of this project and the data available at the upper NUTS levels and country level available on Eurostat website.

Action 5 - Include of  meta information in form of standardised flags as used by Eurostat and sending the data via eDAMIS to Eurostat in a standardised format.

Action 6 - Information regarding inconsistencies between data, data definitions and compliance with these definitions will be sent accompanied by the appropriate flags.

Action 7 - NSI will make available to Eurostat the requested information, in order for Eurostat to use control procedures and make regular reports containing potentially erroneous data values. 

Action 8 - Analyze potential erroneous data to clarify aspects on Eurostat and correct data if necessary.

Action 9 - Validate dataset for the reference year 2017 within 9 months after the start of the action. 

Action 10 - Validate dataset for the reference year 2018 within 18 months after the start of the action, if the data will be available by that time.

III: Provide metadata

 Action 1- Description of the data collected relating to source, the methodology used to estimate variables, data quality assessment and deliver it to Eurostat. For this delivery the National Reference Metadata Editor (NRME) will be used;

Action 2 – NSI will deliver metadata file according to ESS standards. 

IV: Raise awareness and increase knowledge about sub-national statistics   

Action 1 - Conduct a comparative analysis of the data and publish the results on the NIS website in the sub-national subsection;
Action 2 - Increase awareness by disseminating the results through electronic and printed information materials on the topic, publish a publication dedicated to sub-national statistics  (200 copies+CD) regarding the data and transmit to the stakeholders.;
Action 3 - NSI will develop an mobile application (Android app) dedicated to sub-national statistics.

V: Improve the use of new data sources and novel methods in order to produce sub-national statistics

 Action 1: Analyze available administrative data sources for small area estimation;

Action 2: Analyze the possibility to integrate the available administrative data sources in the estimation methods used;

Action 3: Use estimation methods in order to produce new data at sub-national level;

Action 4: Assessing the quality of the estimated data.

VI: Draw up final report

The final reports will include data regarding the data transmitted, recomandations and conclusions. 

Participate in the quality control of variables - Eurostat has checked the data using multivariate controls and univariate controls and prepared a report containing potentially erroneous data. The list of potential errors has been examined; the data concerned was checked and corrected if necessary. The validated data was transmitted to Eurostat in a standardized format or confirmed the originally transmitted value.

Participate in the quality control of indicators - potential errors has been examined; the data concerned was checked and corrected if necessary. The validated data was transmitted to Eurostat in a standardized format or confirmed the originally transmitted value.

Starting from Data collection for sub-national statistics (mainly cities) project all are checked by the use of EDIT Data Validation Tool for errors.

Not available.

Not available.

For the Urban Audit Project, statistical data had to be collected at three spatial levels: the level of the administrative city, the level of the city's larger urban zone and national level.

a) Cities (C)

Romania identified 35 cities to participate to Urban Audit Project: Bucureşti, Cluj-Napoca, Timişoara, Craiova, Brăila, Oradea, Bacău, Arad, Sibiu, Târgu Mureş, Piatra Neamţ, Călăraşi, Giurgiu, Alba Iulia, Constanţa, Iaşi, Galaţi, Braşov, Ploieşti, Piteşti, Baia Mare, Buzău, Satu Mare, Botoşani, Râmnicu Vâlcea, Suceava, Drobeta-Turnu Severin, Focşani, Târgu Jiu, Tulcea, Târgovişte, Slatina, Bârlad, Roman and Bistrita.

b) Larger Urban Zones (LUZ)

In order to create the larger urban zone, NIS Romania proposed to be attached to the cities the bordering urbanised communes situated near vicinity of the municipalities selected as Urban Audit cities.

c) National (N)

There were made no changes to the spatial units, in order to be able to preserve the geographical coverage and to be able to create a long time series.

Compilation of maps for the spatial units of Urban Audit cities - NIS created the digital maps of spatial units, which have not been supplied to Eurostat in the previous project; transformed digital maps to the required format and transmitted the maps to Eurostat.

Recommendations for improvements

We believe that no modifications should be made to the delineation of spatial units, because keeping the same spatial units and using the same methodology will ensure the comparability and coverage of the variables. Using the same methodology to establish LUZ levels for others cities, in the next projects, will assure comparability between cities and LUZ areas.

Annexes mentionned in this file are to be found at Urban Audit Reference Metadata.