European Union and Population and Housing Censuses around the year 20011 Aarno Laihonen Eurostat/E4 Jean Monnet Building L-2920 Luxembourg [email protected] Countries around the world have started preparations for the 2000 census round. Population and housing censuses are still a major source of demographic and socio-economic statistics in most countries. They are also a unique source of geographically detailed data. The demand for these has increased rapidly in recent years – led, for example, by development of powerful geographic information systems applications in spatial analysis, and by logistics, physical planning and managing transportation networks. This is why censuses are still conducted in most countries, even if the relative cost of a traditional census has risen to a level more and more difficult to justify in an age of government budget cuts. Content of censuses has been coordinated internationally under United Nations recommendations. The UN regional commission for Europe (ECE) prepared recommendations for Europe for census rounds 1960, 1970, 1980 and 1990. The EU prepared its own programmes to satisfy Community data needs for census rounds 1980 and 1990. These relied on UN/ECE recommendations and were based on Council Directives 73/403 and 87/287. The final workshop of the series on the theme Censuses beyond 2000 will be held in France in the second half of 1999. The workshop proceedings have been published jointly by the organising national statistical institutes and Eurostat and are available from either. Changing census methodology Increasing cost pressures and pressures to reduce respondent burden have created a strong intensive for the countries in Europe to seek new solutions in census data collection and more effective methods of data processing. Increase of the use of administrative registers and data sources and development of automatic procedures in data capturing, checking, editing and coding are examples of the responses of countries to these pressures. However, there are different directions between European countries adopted in the development of census data collection methods. The increase of automatic procedures in different production phases is a more universal feature. When the present EEA countries are looked at from the point of view of their plans on the 2001 round of censuses and beyond, they fall roughly in the following four groups: Countries with traditional census (Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain and UK); Countries with entirely or largely register based census (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden); Countries in transition from traditional to register-based census (Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland); Countries seeking for another solution (combination of registers and surveys, using spatial and temporal rotation etc.: France, Germany and Netherlands). 1 The views expressed in the paper do not represent the official view of Eurostat but those of the author. 1 Most of the central and eastern European countries are planning to hold traditional censuses around 2001. Only Latvia and Slovenia are planning extensive use of registers (population register and building and dwelling register) in addition to census forms. Many of the central European countries are planning to use OCR and IR techniques as well as automatic coding in census data processing. Census programme of the European Community for 2001 Preparations for Community census guidelines and table programme for the 2001 round were started by a working party meeting in spring 1996. The Statistical Programme Committee (SPC) agreed in May 1997 on guideline principles and requested an extensive and comprehensive table programme to reduce ad hoc data requests afterwards. After further preparatory work by a task force and final working party discussion, SPC approved the EU census programme at its meeting on 27 November 1997 in Luxembourg. This followed a lively discussion, with some reservations by one Member State and some slight modifications. The EU census programme is – for Community purposes – a clarification and extension of UN/ECE recommendations for census round 2000, prepared by ECE Statistical Division in collaboration with Eurostat. This time the programme has the nature of a “gentlemen’s agreement”, which Member States will try to keep as far as reasonably possible considering national circumstances. It means that this time EU census programme will not have any special legal basis. However, compared with the former Directive-based guidelines and programme, it can be considered a clear step forward. It has a wider international scope and explicit connection with the UN/ECE census recommendations. The content will be taken into account not only by EU and EFTA countries but also by most Central and Eastern European countries and even by many Newly-Independent States. More notice is taken of new and different ways to produce census statistics – such as use of registers and administrative records, as well as sample surveys, instead of traditional separate data collection from the whole population. The programme is far more comprehensive and detailed than before, building on the cross- classifications of the core variables of the UN/ECE recommendations, included by most Member States in their national census programmes. Guidelines and tabulation programme, with explanatory notes, have been published in two volymes by Eurostat. Volyme I includes the "gentlemen's agreement" and some conceptual clarifications to ECE/Eurostat Census Recommendations. Volyme II, which covers the table programme with explanatory notes, will be a working tool for the census staff of the National Statistical Institutes when planning and carrying out their national tabulation programmes. 2.