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An annual estimate of spatially disaggregated populations: Spain, 1900–2011

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Abstract

Long-term population estimates are usually based on decennial (or roughly decennial), census-type data, especially those that go beyond the aggregate or national level. The lack of annual population datasets, however, restricts the range of analysis and therefore our knowledge of populations’ behaviour over time. This paper contributes to this scant literature by providing two new long-term, annually and spatially disaggregated population estimates for Spain, a key case study. We use a set of official sources and propose a straightforward method to estimate Spanish annual populations at two levels of spatial disaggregation, the provinces (NUTS III) and their capital cities (a selection of LAU II/NUTS V), between 1900 and 2011. For the cities, our estimates account for changes in boundaries. Our proposed method is especially suitable for countries with a lack of long-term, systematic, historical migration statistics, a common issue. To test the robustness of our estimates, some comparisons are made with previous more aggregated-level or decennial census-based estimates, and a preliminary analysis of the evolution of disaggregated Spanish population is presented.

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Notes

  1. De cos and Reques (2005) and Cardesín and Mirás (2017) provide comprehensive reviews.

  2. Prados de la Escosura (2017, pp. 190–191). See also Goerlich et al. (2006, p. 4) and De la Fuente (2006, p. 4).

  3. The list of all specific sources, including their date of publication, is available from the authors upon request.

  4. The areal interpolation method (e.g. Gregory 2002; Gregory and Ell 2006) is used as reference.

  5. Available at: https://www.ine.es/intercensal/?L=1.

  6. The list of annexations and segregations is available from the authors upon request.

  7. Unreported results without applying the log scale are similar.

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Acknowledgements

We are especially grateful to the journal’s reviewers, and David S. Reher, who helped us to define the estimation procedure, as well as Jordi Martí-Henneberg and Mateu Morillas-Torné, who shared data with us. We also received helpful bibliographical suggestions from Leandro Prados de la Escosura, comments from Vicente Pinilla and assistance in obtaining data from Carlos Serrano. All remaining errors are ours.

Funding

Financial support was provided by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (Research Projects ECO2015-65582, ECO2017-82246-P, PGC2018-095529-B-I00, PGC2018-096640-B-I00 and PID2019-105014GA-I00) and the Government of Aragon–European Fund for Economic and Regional Development (2014–2020) (research projects S27 and ADETRE).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Facultad de Economía y Empresa (Campus Paraíso), Universidad de Zaragoza, c/Gran Vía 2, 50005, Zaragoza, Spain

    Rafael González-Val

  2. Facultat d’Economia i Empresa, Institut d’Economia de Barcelona (IEB), Universitat de Barcelona, c/John M. Keynes, 1-11, 08034, Barcelona, Spain

    Rafael González-Val

  3. Facultad de Economía y Empresa (Campus Paraíso), Instituto Agroalimentario de Aragón (IA2) and Grupo de Estudios Población y Sociedad (GEPS), Universidad de Zaragoza, c/Gran Vía 2, 50005, Zaragoza, Spain

    Javier Silvestre

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Correspondence to Rafael González-Val.

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González-Val, R., Silvestre, J. An annual estimate of spatially disaggregated populations: Spain, 1900–2011. Ann Reg Sci 65, 491–508 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00168-020-00992-6

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