City data from LFS and big data : final report

This document is a result of a project to explore how data collection for cities and functional urban areas can be improved. Cities are getting growing policy attention in Europe. All these activities underline the interest in city level indicators. Currently, a number of indicators are collected at city and functional urban area level, but the indicators typically collected by the Labour Force Survey can rather be found at the regional level than at the city level. The project consisted of two sets of activities. The first part was dedicated to the Labour Force Survey (LFS) to investigate if this source can provide a limited set of annual indicators for functional urban areas (FUA's) and whether gaps in the regional LFS time series could be filled by reattributing previous LFS respondents to the new NUTS regions. The second part dealt with the question if anonymised aggregated mobile phone data can be used to estimate commuting flows or population flows between municipalities or between statistical grid cells. The project was carried out by a consortium of 5 statistical institutes : INSEE (FR), Destatis (DE), Statbel (BE), Statistik Austria (AT) and Statistics Netherlands (NL) as project leader.