2011 COMBINED POPULATION AND HOUSING CENSUS IN GERMANY: METHOD, ORGANIZATION, RESULTS

Matters related to organizing and adopting enumeration methods for population censuses are known to instigate a heated public debate all over the world including in Russia. Some call for modernizing census operations or even abandoning them altogether in favour of other means of obtaining data from statistical units. Reasoning behind proposals for changing fundamental approaches to statistical observation lies in excessively high costs of traditional population censuses and multiple refusal to participate it them from large groups of population. Development of various administrative registers of data and regular country-wide surveys lay the groundwork for revising approaches to conducting general censuses.

The example of Germany is interesting, firstly, because in this country operate solely local population registers and there is no centralized population register. Secondly, there are no personal identification numbers (PIN), which complicates integration of information from population registers and from other sources. This is the first research that traced stepwise oiganization of population census in such an ambiguous situation. German practice demonstrates that it is possible to conduct population census using population registers that do not contain personal identification numbers, but to do so it is necessary to create a register of addresses, buildings, and dwellings. The experience of Germany, as well as of other countries conducting mixed-mode population census, is important and beneficial for Russia especially in the light of the attempt to establish a population register.

Analyzing administration of population and housing census in Germany the author arrived at a conclusion that regardless of all shortcomings and challenges censuses remain to be the only source of statistical information on population and households at a certain point in time, however in modern conditions approaches to conducting them both could and should be modified.

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