Website: Statistics: Rural development

Rural development statistics aim to measure economic, social and environmental issues related to rural areas. Urban-rural typology statistics use the new urban-rural typology. This typology uses a three-step approach to classify the NUTS level 3 regions:

The first step is to identify populations in rural areas: 'rural areas' are all areas outside urban clusters. 'Urban clusters' are clusters of contiguous grid cells of 1 km² with a density of at least 300 inhabitants per km² and a minimum population of 5,000.

In the second step, NUTS3 regions are classified as follows, on the basis of the share of their population in rural areas:
- 'Predominantly rural' if the share of the population living in rural areas is higher than 50%
- 'Intermediate' if the share of the population living in rural areas is between 20% and 50%
- 'Predominantly urban' if the share of the population living in rural areas is below 20%

To resolve the distortion created by extremely small NUTS3 regions, for classification purposes regions smaller than 500 km² are combined with one or more of their neighbours.

In the third step, the size of the urban centres in the region is considered.
- A predominantly rural region which contains an urban centre of more than 200,000 inhabitants making up at least 25% of the regional population becomes intermediate.
- An intermediate region which contains an urban centre of more than 500,000 inhabitants making up at least 25% of the regional population becomes predominantly urban.