The paper is devoted to the development of a statistical framework for air quality assessment at the country level and for the evaluation of the ambient population exposure and risk with respect to airborne pollutants. The framework is based on a multivariate space–time model and on aggregated indices defined at different levels of aggregation in space and time. The indices are evaluated, uncertainty included, by considering both the model outputs and the information on the population spatial distribution. The framework is applied to the analysis of air quality data for Scotland for 2009 referring to European and Scottish air quality legislation
