For purposes of the Moody’s Analytics estimated and forecast data products, we have established geography codes for metropolitan areas in Romania. Romania itself has no official definition. Instead, we have utilized definitions published by ESPON in their 2007 report, which defines FUAs as conterminous with reported counties (NUTS 3 / judete). The two metro areas are:

• Brasov
• Bucharest

In making this decision, we investigated two sources:

• The Zona metropolitana Bucuresti provided maps of the metropolitan area of Bucharest. Ideally we would aggregate communes, but data are limited at that geographic granularity.
• The ESPON study considered metropolitan areas in 29 European countries. ESPON 1.1.1 produced a list of functional urban areas (FUAs) based on population in standardized NUTS-type areas; ESPON 1.4.3 made corrections to this list and added the concept of a morphological urban area (MUA), or core, such that a FUA consists of a core plus a surrounding labor pool. This is akin to the OMB's methodology for U.S. core-based statistical areas.

The two Romanian metros of interest, Brasov and Bucharest, comprise the bulk of the populations of their respective counties (the NUTS 3 areas of the same names), and therefore county-level data constitutes a satisfactory proxy.

References:

• ESPON: Project 1.4.3 Study on Urban Functions
• ESPON: 1.4.3 Final Report (PDF, 2007)
• Zona metropolitana Bucuresti: Maps and Statistics
  • Romanian
  • English (machine translation)
• Moody's Analytics: Official geographic structure of Romania (TBA)
• Moody's Analytics: Subnational data summary for Romania (TBA)
• Moody's Analytics: Estimated data for Romania (TBA)

Table 1 of 1. Metropolitan areas in Romania. We define each of our metropolitan areas as conterminous with reported counties (NUTS 3 / judete).

Romania has a national geo code of IROU, all codes for its geographic subdivisions use IROU as a prefix, and all Moody’s Analytics metro area codes feature the letter “M.” Each of the two areas is identified as IROU(underscore)M(three letters), and may be retrieved in bulk with the basket geo wild card IROU_M^^^.