Page 221 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 1

IPS142 Jorge L. V. V. et al.
According to the law, there is no restriction for registering in Spain in terms
of legal situation. All people living or willing to live in Spain, regardless of their
legal situation, have the right to be registered (this is actually an obligation)
and they normally are, since being registered brings many advantages and no
drawbacks.
For each person, Padrón contains these variables: gender, date of birth,
place of birth (country, in the case of foreigners), nationality, educational
attainment and national identity number. Foreigners in legal situation have the
number of residence permit and people in irregular situation the passport
number.
Because of all the details mentioned above and also because the quality
of this source has improved every year since the beginning, Padron is the main
element on which the Population Census is built. The 2016-PCF is created
using Padron as of January 1st 2016 as starting point of information. This
constitutes the backbone of the population file and dozens of administrative
records of different nature have been linked to it in order to compose an
individual information similar to the one that would be obtained with a
questionnaire addressed to the households.

3. Two questions that must be answered by a Census
Every Census must give an answer to two questions. The first one, it should
provide information about the number of people living in the country with a
high level of geographical detail. But in addition, it must provide detailed
characteristics (for example current activity status, year of arrival to the country
or educational attainment) about all these people. From a graphic point of
view, both questions can be seen as a large single file of two dimensions. The
population figure will determine the number of records in the file (in vertical)
and the number of variables will determine its amplitude (in horizontal).

3.1 How many people live in Spain? The signs-of-life method
The original purpose of the censuses was to count the population. In Spain
this main objective is not so important anymore, because due to the existence
of Padrón, the uncertainty in knowing the population figures during the
intercensal periods has disappeared.

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