Abstract
Local governments need reliable information about the cities they are governing. However, an analysis of the availability of basic descriptive data (population data, information on household composition, unemployment, poverty, condition of the housing stock, homelessness, recorded crime and composition and size of local municipal income) in 55 European cities makes clear that these data are often not available because they have neither been collected nor disseminated. On average, 30 percent of simple local performance indicators is missing. National statistical traditions may help explaining the lack of data-gathering.
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