Publish layers with NUTS codes

[nickpeihl]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-level_NUTS_of_the_European_Union

We'll need to investigate whether we can simply add NUTS codes to existing subdivision layers or if a new layer needs to be created.

[markov00]

NUTS subdivision is a standard used by all European countries for geographical statistical analysis. Due to historical reasons, the administrative borders and subdivisions across EU member states are unique and they only overlap slightly in functions across states.
NUTS tries to align these differences using a multi-level set of subdivisions.

There are 3+1 subdivisions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenclature_of_Territorial_Units_for_Statistics:

• NUTS 1: major socio-economic regions
• NUTS 2: basic regions for the application of regional policies
• NUTS 3: small regions for specific diagnoses
• everything below like municipalities

The principles used to split boundaries into each levels are:

• Principle 1: Population thresholds
  The NUTS regulation defines minimum and maximum population thresholds for the size of the NUTS regions:

Level	Minimum	Maximum
NUTS 1	3 000 000	7 000 000
NUTS 2	800 000	3 000 000
NUTS 3	150 000	800 000

For administrative levels of NUTS, it is sufficient if the average size of the corresponding regions lies within the thresholds; in case of non-administrative levels, each individual region should do so. Exceptions exist however in case of geographical, socio-economic, historical, cultural or environmental circumstances.

Despite the aim of ensuring that regions of comparable size all appear at the same NUTS level, each level still contains regions which differ greatly in terms of population.

• Principle 2: NUTS favours administrative divisions
  For practical reasons the NUTS classification generally mirrors the territorial administrative division of the Member States. This supports the availability of data and the implementation capacity of policy.

• Principle 3: Regular and extraordinary amendments
  The NUTS classification can be amended, but generally not more frequently than every three years. The amendments are usually based on changes of the territorial structure in one or more Member States.
  In case of a substantial reorganisation of the administrative structure of a Member State, amendments to the NUTS may be adopted at intervals of less than three years. This has only happened once so far, in 2014 for Portugal.

Having this type of metadata and these boundaries can increase the adoption of ES and Kibana by research/statistical institution or commercial companies that use this standard. Most EU funded research projects leverage this standard if they need to work with aggregated georeferenced data. Each EU initiative usually publish statistical data using this standard.

The data (shapefile, topojson, geojson) can be found here: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/gisco/geodata/reference-data/administrative-units-statistical-units/nuts