Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2017/543 of 22 March 2017 laying down rules for the application of Regulation (EC) No 763/2008 of the European Parliament and of the Council on population and housing censuses as regards the technical specifications of the topics and of their breakdowns (Text with EEA relevance. )

THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION,

Having regard to the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union,

Having regard to Regulation (EC) No 763/2008 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 9 July 2008 on population and housing censuses (1), and in particular Article 5(4) thereof,

Whereas:

(1) To ensure that data from the population and housing censuses conducted in the Member States are comparable, and to allow reliable Union-wide overviews to be drawn up, the census topics need to be established and broken down in the same way in all Member States. Technical specifications for those topics and their breakdowns should therefore be adopted.

(2) The measures provided for in this Regulation are in accordance with the opinion of the European Statistical System Committee,

HAS ADOPTED THIS REGULATION:

Article 1

The technical specifications for the census topics and their breakdowns which are to be applied to the data to be sent to the Commission for the reference year 2021 are listed in the Annex.

Article 2

This Regulation shall enter into force on the twentieth day following that of its publication in the Official Journal of the European Union.

This Regulation shall be binding in its entirety and directly applicable in all Member States.

Done at Brussels, 22 March 2017.

For the Commission The President Jean-Claude JUNCKER

(1) OJ L 218, 13.8.2008, p. 14.