Urban and regional policies are increasingly targeted by area. The common feature of this drive towards the targeting of public policy is the need for improved information on the candidate areas and better methodologies to aid the prioritisation process. The pressure for more and better information is also increased by recent academic and policy debates around the importance of identifying the distinctiveness of individual regions and localities in terms of their strengths and weaknesses. In this paper, four basic steps for a well-founded targeting analysis are identified. There is a need: to clarify the concept to be measured; to specify the key issues by which the concept is to be represented; to identify adequate statistical indicators covering those issues; and to create an overall index to summarise the information. In the penultimate section of the paper it is emphasised that there are numerous ways to produce a multivariate index and that the choice between them is not simple but will greatly affect the results obtained. Although it is stressed that different options will be more appropriate for different purposes, some ‘best-practice’ guidelines are identified.
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