Residency index – a tool for measuring the population size

Abstract

After the Estonian census 2011 the census team found that there was some under-coverage of the census data. To determine the amount of non-enumerated people the following procedure was used. The set of people belonging to Estonian population register as residents, but not enumerated in census 2011 were regarded as potential residents. All existing administrative registers were used to define the signs of life for these people: activity in a register during 2011 gave to a person a sign of life. The signs of life were used as binary variables to discriminant the residents and non-residents. The following task was to use the methodology for following years and to cover the whole population. Hence we decided to define for each person from the population a residency index between 0 and 1 that will be recalculated yearly using the signs of life.