A Municipal Database from the 2011 Spanish Census Francisco J

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: www.emeraldinsight.com/2632-7627.htm AEA 27,81 A municipal database from the 2011 Spanish census Francisco J. Goerlich University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain and 226 Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Economicas, Valencia, Spain Received 9 April 2018 Revised 4 May 2019 Accepted 21 June 2019 Abstract Purpose – The paper aims to describe the process to obtain a complete municipal database from the 2011 Spanish Census information. By complete, the authors mean variables for the full sample of the 8,116 municipalities as of the census reference date. In addition, the database should be consistent with the public census information released by the National Statistical Institute: microdata and customized tables. Design/methodology/approach – The authors use mainly small area demographic and synthetic estimators that are reconciled using biproportional adjustment (iterative proportional fitting), when needed. Findings – As a result, the authors obtain a complete and consistent municipal database composing 55 variables related to socio-demographic characteristics of persons. Originality/value – The provision of a complete and consistent municipal database, available for download, which is absent in the original 2011 Spanish Census. Keywords Municipalities, 2011 Spanish Census, Small area Paper type Technical paper 1. Introduction The 2011 Census marked a significant methodological turning point in the Spanish census tradition. It moved away from the classic census methodology, based on exhaustive fieldwork, toward a mixed system in which the population count and its most basic demographic characteristics are taken from administrative records –the Padron,or Municipal Register– and the remaining population characteristics come from a large-scale survey of around 10 per cent of the population [Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE), 2011]. © Francisco J. Goerlich. Published in Applied Economic Analysis. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/ legalcode The author wishes to thank Jorge Luis Vega Valle, Carmen Teijeiro Breijo, Antonio Argüeso Jimenez and Ignacio Duque Rodriguez de Arellano from the Spanish Statistical Institute (INE) for their generous support in resolving innumerable methodological questions related to the census information, and is also grateful for feedback from members of the technical staff at the Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Economicas (Ivie), especially Irene Zaera and Carlos Albert, whose Applied Economic Analysis comments contributed to the iteration process in developing the disaggregation algorithms Vol. 27 No. 81, 2019 pp. 226-238 mentioned in the paper. The author is grateful for support from the FBBVA-Ivie research program, Emerald Publishing Limited and from project ECO2015-70632-R. An extended version of this work (in Spanish) is available as a 2632-7627 DOI 10.1108/AEA-07-2019-0013 Working Paper, Goerlich (2016),athttp://dx.medra.org/10.12842/MUNICIPIOS_CENSO_2011 Although this methodological change does not necessarily imply a loss in the quality of Database from the resulting information (Goerlich et al.,2015), a number of caveats must be mentioned, not the 2011 only in light of the final information published by the INE through its various census breakdowns –Persons, Households, Dwellings and Buildings– but also in relation to the Spanish territorial areas referred to –National, Autonomous Communities, Provinces, Municipalities census or Census Sections. The 2011 Census provides scant information for smaller territorial areas, including municipalities, which are the basic administrative unit in the division of the territory, and for 227 which censuses offer the only opportunity to gather homogenous and comparable data that goes beyond purely demographic information. This study describes and applies a simple method to obtain estimations for the large majority of census variables, and for the full set of 8,116 municipalities included in the 2011 Census. These estimations are consistent with the published census information. The frame of reference for obtaining variables at the municipal level is the census microdata, which is the source of information for all the non-demographic population characteristics. The final aim is to create a complete and consistent municipal database for a wide set of variables. The paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, the basic elements of the census methodology are described. This stage is necessary to understand the process followed to disaggregate the information at the municipal level, which is described in Section 3. The resulting database and how it can be accessed are presented in Section 4. The paper ends with some brief conclusions in Section 5. 2. Structure of the information in the 2011 Census 2.1 Information on persons and households The information on persons and their characteristics for the 2011 Census is based on two fundamental sources: the Municipal Register, for purely demographic information; and a large survey, in principle designed to be representative at the municipal level, for all other population characteristics (Instituto Nacional de Estadística [INE], 2011). These two pillars provide different information and an understanding of how they interrelate is needed to understand the process followed to create the database. First, one might naturally ask why the basic demographic characteristics of the population are taken from Municipal Register, even though they are not exactly the same as those from the Municipal Register for the census reference date, 1 November 2011. This is due to the very nature of the Municipal Register as a legally regulated administrative registry, which means that any alteration to it must have a legal basis; in other words, alterations cannot be made in the statistical adjustments. When the continuous Municipal Register was introduced in 1998, the population figures from the Municipal Register were disassociated from the census population figures, such that the population of the 2001 Census does not coincide with the population figures derived from the Municipal Register. It is well known that the way the Municipal Register is managed leads to an over estimation of the population, essentially associated with the register of foreign people, although problems have also been found in the upper and lower age distributions (Goerlich, 2007, 2012). As a result, to find out the “population figure” of Spain and its territories, the Municipal Register – as the best statistical estimation of the resident population – had to be adjusted to give a more accurate reflection of the real situation. The INE therefore used the Municipal Register to build a pre-census file (PCF) that was adjusted as necessary to the increases and decreases in the natural population movement, and in which each registry entry had a count factor equal to 1 if the person could be proven to reside in Spain by crossing with other administrative records such as Social Security data, or was unknown if no conclusive proof AEA was available that the person was a resident in Spain. These registry entries were known as 27,81 “doubtful”. Of the PCF registry entries, 97.2 per cent had a count factor equal to 1. At the same time a large sampling survey was conducted with two objectives: (1) to determine the count factor in the PCF doubtful registry entries; and (2) to estimate the population characteristics. 228 The reference population for the sample is the population residing in main dwellings. The population living in institutional residences was therefore excluded from the sample and treated in a separate statistical operation: Encuesta de Colectivos del Censo de Poblacion y Viviendas 2011 (Instituto Nacional de Estadística [INE], 2013a). 2.2 The fit between the sample and the information from the pre-census file The PCF and the sample are independent operations that must be reconciled. This reconciliation process, carried out by the INE, is based on two actions that are not wholly independent. First, to determine the count factor of the doubtful entries both sets of information were partitioned into classes based on observable characteristics – age, nationality and place of residence – and a nominal crossing was made between the sample gathered from the fieldwork and the PCF, so the registry entries could be linked and those appearing in the PCF as doubtful could be identified if they were actually gathered in the sample. From this identification, using the principle of analogy at the class level the count factors were estimated for the doubtful registry entries. The detailed procedure is described in Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE) (2012) and Goerlich et al. (2015, chapter 1). What interests us here is that following this operation, each PCF entry has an assigned count factor. We therefore have a final weighted census file which determines the census population figure and its basic demographic characteristics. The resident population deriving from the census through this procedure was 46,815,916. Second, the sample must be calibrated to the population to ensure consistency between the

Load more