Notes and methodological comments (Capital-city regions in Europe 2000)
This applet deals with Eurostat data, for some eight different social and economic variables, from one region each of the 15 EU member states and the 12 accession countries, referring to the year 2000. In each instance, the region studied is the NUTS 2 region containing the capital of the country. NUTS is the French acronym for the nomenclature of territorial units for statistics. It represents a hierarchical classification (NUTS 1, NUTS 2, NUTS 3). Most countries are subdivided into several NUTS 1 regions which are subdivided in NUTS 2 regions and so on.
Nature of regions and the reference year
It is important to note that these regions are not the same as the capital cities themselves. In certain cases (such as Inner London) the city and its suburbs extend far beyond the NUTS 2 region containing the heart of the city. By contrast, some other NUTS 2 regions in the selection may be vastly bigger than the capital city. In the case of two current Member States (Denmark and Luxembourg) and no fewer than six accession countries (Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta and Slovenia), the whole country is a NUTS 2 region.
Names and abbreviations of countries and their "capital-city regions"
The 15 Member States and their "capital-city" regions are:
Country	NUTS 2 code	Region name
A Austria	AT13	Wien
B Belgium	BE1	Bruxelles-Capitale
D Germany	DE3	Berlin
DK Denmark	DK	Danmark
E Spain	ES3	Comunidad de Madrid
EL Greece	GR3	Attiki
F France	FR1	Île de France
FIN Finland	FI16	Uusimaa (suuralue)
I Italy	IT6	Lazio
IRL Ireland	IE02	Southern and Eastern
L Luxembourg	LU	Luxembourg
NL Netherlands	NL33	Noord-Holland
P Portugal	PT13	Lisboa e Vale do Tejo
S Sweden	SE01	Stockholm
UK United Kingdom	UKI1	Inner London
The 12 accession countries and the corresponding "capital-city" regions are:
Country	NUTS 2 code	Region name
BG Bulgaria	BG04	Yugozapaden
CY Cyprus	CY	Kypros / Kibris
CZ Czech Republic	CZ01	Praha
EE Estonia	EE	Eesti
HU Hungary	HU01	Kozep-Magyarorszag
LT Lithuania	LT	Lietuva
LV Latvia	LV	Latvija
MT Malta	MT	Malta
PL Poland	PL07	Mazowieckie
RO Romania	RO08	Bucuresti
SI Slovenia	SI	Slovenija
SK Slovak Republic	SK01	Bratislavsky
The following map illustrates the above regions.
Visualisation of social and economic variables
This interactive element visualises for two sets of European countries (15 EU member states or, alternatively, 12 EU accession countries) the relative values for eight different social and economic variables. The visualisation is carried out by means of bar charts.
A bar chart is a graphical tool of descriptive Statistics which represents each element xi of a given data set by means of a bar of length xi (i = 1, 2, .. ,n).