Population and Vital Statistics

Abstract

The principal modern sources of population data are official censuses and registration records. In Europe, the earliest regular enumeration of national population dates from around the beginning of the period covered in this work. But outside Scandinavia (and some though by no means all the Italian states), systematic census-taking and civil registration of births, deaths, and marriages have been nineteenth- or even twentieth-century phenomena. Historical coverage of the different countries, therefore, varies widely in scope. There is also good reason to believe, unfortunately, that it varies in accuracy. The almost universal tendency of censuses is to under-enumerate, though published results may also have been deliberately inflated on occasion for political purposes. A proportion of vital events similarly escapes the registrar’s net. But in most countries these tendencies have almost certainly declined over time, as officials have become more sophisticated, and as the population became more accustomed to procedures and less suspicious of their purpose. However, the increase in the number of town-dwellers living alone in recent decades, and, still more, the development of considerable immigration from poorer lands, may have reversed this process in some countries. Until quite recently¹ there was no means of knowing either the extent of understatement or its variation over time, so for the most part it is impossible to do more than guess at margins of error in the past. By and large, it seems safe to take all regular censuses after the first two or three in a series as accurate to within five per cent overall.² Isolated, sporadic censuses are probably rather less reliable in general.