Revising Long-Established Population Estimates in Australia: Reasons, Methods and Implications

Chapter
First Online:
Part of the Applied Demography Series book series (ADS, volume 9)

Abstract

Official population estimates in Australia are derived from the five-yearly population census supplemented by undercount rates, which estimate the number of people missed in the census. Between censuses, population growth is modelled using component- and regression-based methods. After each census, these modelled estimates are superseded by the new census-based, or rebased, estimates. However, major differences between the 2011 modelled and census-based estimates, caused by a change in the way the census undercount rate was derived, led to a one-off ‘recasting’ revision to 20 years of historical population estimates. This extraordinary revision process led to a revisit of the approach to rebasing adopted in response to past censuses, where it was found that strict reliance on volatile census undercount rates, regardless of methodological changes, led to implausible population change between censuses. Discounting the modelled estimates or any other data source that indicates population change between censuses had a detrimental impact on the quality of the rebased estimates before recasting. Lessons learned from the recasting exercise could be used to improve the quality of Australia’s population estimates from the 2016 census and beyond.

Keywords

Undercount Rebasing Recasting Intercensal difference 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Phil Browning, Tricia Chester, Beidar Cho, AJ Lanyon and Michael Roden for their useful comments in the production of this chapter.

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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Australian Bureau of StatisticsAdelaideAustralia

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