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Abstract
The modelling and information system RAUMIS is used for policy impact assessment to
measure the impact of agriculture on the environment. The county level resolution often limits
the analysis and a further disaggregation at the municipality level would reduce aggregation
bias and improve the assessment. Although the necessary data exists in Germany, data
protection rules (DPR) prohibit their direct use. With methods such as the Locally Weighted
Averages (LWA), and with aggregation singling production activities into larger groups of
activities, the data at the municipality level can be made publicly available. However, this
reduces the information content and introduces an additional error. This paper’s aim is to
investigate how much information is necessary to satisfactorily estimate Germany-wide
production activity levels at the municipality level and whether the data requirements are still
in compliance with the DPR. We apply Highest Posterior Density (HPD) estimation, which is
easily able to include sample information as prior. We tested different prior information
content at the municipality level. However, the goodness of the developed estimation
approach can only be evaluated having knowledge about the population. Because the real
population is not known to us, we took advantage of the special situation in Bavaria and
derived a pseudo population for that region. This is used to draw information conforming to
DPR for our estimation and to evaluate the resulting estimates. We found that the proposed
approach is capable of adequately estimating most activities without violating the DPR. These
findings allow us to extend the approach towards the Germany-wide municipality coverage in
RAUMIS.