The 2021 population and housing register-based census: a great step forward in the statistical knowledge of the population in Spain

Abstract

Traditionally, The National Statistics Institute (INE) has carried out the population and housing censuses, based on door-to-door enumeration, as the best feasible photograph of the population. But census information can be already found in the administrative registers, so why asking the households? Going through the entire territory to census the population is a source of errors of all kinds. Obtaining data from administrative records is a very complex task and a real challenge, but for a couple of decades they have been used to produce statistics in many areas and we have concluded that they offer today better quality than surveys. The population census is no exception. We are not facing any leap into the void but rather a process that has been maturing at INE for more than twenty years and that is already bringing a qualitative improvement in our knowledge of the population in Spain.