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. For information on data access please follow this Link.

Data Availabilty

*PhD students, research assistants, postdocs or persons with a higher position in a publicly funded research institution, also on behalf of students interested in data.

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

Data Descriptions

Breidenbach, Philipp and Heinze, Inga (2025), FDZ Data description: Socio-Economic Data on Grid Level (RWI-GEO-GRID v15) – 2023, RWI Projektberichte, Essen. Download.

Breidenbach, Philipp and Eilers, Lea. "RWI-GEO-GRID: Socio-economic data on grid level " Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik, vol. 238, no. 6, 2018, pp. 609-616. https://doi.org/10.1515/jbnst-2017-0171

Citation

RWI – Leibniz Institute for Economic Research, & microm Micromarketing-Systeme und Consult GmbH. (2025). Socio-economic data on grid level (SUF Off-site) (Version 15) [Data set]. RWI – Leibniz Institute for Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.7807/MICROM:SUF:V15

RWI – Leibniz Institute for Economic Research, & microm Micromarketing-Systeme und Consult GmbH. (2025). Socio-economic data on grid level ( SUF On-site) (Version 15) [Data set]. RWI – Leibniz Institute for Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.7807/MICROM:V15