The availability of reliable statistical data at cities’ level or more generally at the level of significant small area entities such as urban areas etc., is essential for monitoring economic, social and environmental policies such as the sustainable development or smart cities. Unfortunately, the degree of reliability of data available from surveys can differ from one country to another and from area to area within the same country.

The use of Small Area Estimation (SAE) techniques can be a solution to improve the quality of city statistics. The extensive use of such techniques within the European Union is constrained by the fact that not all member states have the same capacity of dealing with small area estimation techniques. Appropriate guidance, recommendations of best practices need to be provided.

Several SAE techniques have been proposed in the literature since the end of the 1980s. In the recent years, Eurostat was looking with a particular interest to this field with aim to identify the most suitable solutions applicable to the European Union cities to announce the quality of their statistical indicators.

Following a first project “SAE for city statistics”, where experts had tested the applicability of SAE in the City statistics by producing estimates of the Survey on Income and Living Conditions (SILC) indicator ‘Share of persons at risk of poverty or social exclusion’ (AROPE) for twenty selected cities and their Functional Urban Areas; this present new project intends to further extend such simulation exercise and to derive upon the obtained results guidelines on SAE to be applied by the EU member states.

GOPA will support the project, started in July 2018, with the aim to:

• Perform a design-based simulation study applied to a synthetic population;
• Produce guidelines for Eurostat and the NSIs on how to produce estimates of indicators from sample surveys at city and Functional Urban Areas (FUA) level;
• Present a scientific summary of the project outcomes, including the IT tool design-based simulation tool.