Censal-Ratio Methods

Abstract

In the late 17th century, John Graunt estimated the population of London and then of the whole of England and Wales using what today is known as a censal-ratio method (Devlin 2008: 93-94). Not long afterward, in the 18th century, the French mathematician, Laplace, also used a censal-ratio method in combination with recorded births and a population sample to estimate the population of France (Stigler, 1986:163-164). However, methodological development really only took off in the late 1930s and early 1940s, fueled in large part by the need for low-cost and timely information generated by the great depression of the 1930s and World War II (Bryan, 2004; Eldridge, 1947; Shryock, 1938; Shryock and Lawrence, 1949). In modern times, the censal-ratio method is usually traced to Bogue (1950) who introduced the “vital rates method.”