Website: Statistics: Metropolitan regions

Metropolitan regions are NUTS3 regions or a combination of NUTS3 regions which represent all agglomerations of at least 250,000 inhabitants. These agglomerations were identified using the Urban Audit's Functional Urban Area (FUA). Each agglomeration is represented by at least one NUTS3 region. If in an adjacent NUTS3 region more than 50% of the population also lives within this agglomeration, it is included in the metro.

As the metro-regions are based on agglomerations, which include the commuter belt around a city, this approach corrects the distortions created by commuting and the GDP per inhabitant becomes meaningful, whereas comparison of GDP per inhabitant of NUTS3 regions is far more difficult to interpret, since the difference may be partly artificial.