Integration of geographic and statistical data for better EU policy making

In recognising its key role in developing European policies and legislation the European Commission has published the "Better Regulation Guidelines" aiming to improve the quality of drafting legislation. According to those guidelines, better regulation is "(...) a way of working to ensure, that political decisions are prepared in an open, transparent manner, informed by the best available evidence (...)", thus emphasising the importance of evidence in drafting policies and legislations. Such evidence is usually represented at least partly by quantitative data and comes into play at several stages of the policy cycle: - Identifying issues which require a policy response, - performing ex-ante impact assessments of the policy options, - monitoring the policies implementation and - evaluating the policies implementation and impacts in an ex-post setting all require a sound data backing. As the EUs territory is quite heterogenous and comprises a lot of differentiated Member States and their regions, the policy drafting and implementation should not only take into account the Union- or Member State level but recognise the different regional situations and thus different needs to act or different susceptibility towards policy actions. This is particularly relevant for EU policies explicitly targeting this heterogeneity, such as EU Cohesion policy or the implementation of the Just Transition Mechanism in the context of the Green Deal.