RWI-GEO-GRID: Socio-Economic Data on grid level

The importance of small-scale data in the economic and social sciences is growing, for example to analyze neighborhood effects or to control for spatial factors. In Germany, however, the statistical offices do not provide socioeconomic data for the whole country below the district or municipality level.

The RWI-GEO-GRID dataset, which can be used as a Scientific Use File, is based on 1km² grids and thus serves the gap of official statistics. The grids have the advantage that they are time-invariant and evenly distributed over Germany and are based on the EU-wide INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe) projection. Beyond that, however, they can be aggregated to any larger regional level. The basis of this dataset is a cooperation with microm Mikromarketing und Consult GmbH. 

The data set is based on nearly 220,000 grid cells in which residential and commercial properties are found. For these rasters, socioeconomic data are provided in the RWI-GEO-GRID dataset. For each grid cell, the dataset contains a variety of variables on households, household structure, demographics, share of foreigners, mobility, purchasing power, as well as unemployment rate and loan default risk. The data are currently available for 2005 and 2009-2021. 

Data Descriptions

Breidenbach, P. und L. Eilers (2018), RWI-GEO-Grid: Socio-economic data on grid level. Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik 238 (6): 609-616. DOI: 10.1515/jbnst-2017-0171
 

Metadata Schemes

RWI-GEO-GRID: Socio-economic data on grid level - Scientific Use File (wave 13)
DOI: 10.7807/microm:suf:v13

RWI-GEO-GRID: Socio-economic data on grid level (wave 13)
DOI: 10.7807/microm:v13

DOIs of previous versions can be found here: http://fdz.rwi-essen.de/doi.html .
 

Data Availabilty

The dataset is available for scientific purposes as Scientific Use File (SUF) for a fee of 200 Euro + 19% VAT. For information on data access please follow this Link.

A use of the weakly anonymized dataset is possible in the context of a guest stay at the FDZ Ruhr, if the SUF was used before. The weakly anonymized dataset also includes very sparsely populated 1km² cells, which were anonymized in the Scientific Use File. These are anonymized in the respective category if population, number of houses, number of households or number of commercial properties are each smaller than 10.