In preparation for the upcoming enlargement of
the European Union, Eurostat and the national
statistical institutes of the 13 candidate countries
have agreed on a regional breakdown (2) to be
used by the European Commission for statistical
purposes whenever possible. These regions have
been defined according to principles similar to
those used in the establishment of the Community
nomenclature of territorial units for statistics
NUTS).
However, this classification does not preclude
any decision on the NUTS which will be
taken as and when individual countries join the
EU. Given that the agreement on the regional
structure to be used for Turkey is too recent for
data collection to have started, data coverage for
candidate countries in this yearbook is restricted
to the remaining 12 countries. In individual cases,
it has not proved possible to include data for some
or all candidate countries in a particular map because
the data delivery structure for that specific
field of statistics is still in the process of being established.