Generally, a local administrative unit (LAU) is a low level administrative division of a country, ranked below a province, region, or state. Not all countries describe their locally governed areas this way, but it can be descriptively applied anywhere to refer to counties, municipalities, etc.

In the European Union, LAUs are basic components of Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) regions. For each EU member country, two levels of Local Administrative Units (LAU) are defined: LAU-1 and LAU-2, which were previously called NUTS-4 and NUTS-5 respectively, until the NUTS regulation went into force in July 2003. For some countries, the LAU-1 level is not defined, and thus equivalent to the NUTS-3 level. A similar statistical system is defined for the candidate countries and members of the European Free Trade Association.

[edit] See also

• Local government
• Local Government Area

[edit] External links

• Eurostat Local Administrative Units (LAU codes of each country can be downloaded here)
• Table of correspondance between NUTS levels and national administrativ units
• Correspondence between the regional levels and the national administrative units (EFTA and CEC countries)