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IPS142 Jorge L. V. V. et al.
In the same way that it has happened with the 2011 Census, 2021 Census
takes Padrón as its basic element. The next step involves performing several
additional controls:
• Verification that births and deaths are up-to-date as of the
reference date.
• Analysis of the expiration date of Padron foreigners.
• Detection of "signs of life" of those people that appear in other
files like Tax Agency or Social Security.
• Application of the 12-month criterion

Using all this information, a counting algorithm has been designed (still
provisional and also susceptible of improvement) that provides a provisional
population figure based on the signs-of-life method. As it can be seen in the
following table, results obtained by the algorithm used in the 2016-PCF are
very similar to those provided by Padrón:

2016-PCF Padrón Difference (PCF-Padrón)
TOTAL 46,581,681 46,557,008 24,673
Spanish 41,972,389 41,938,427 33,962

Foreigners 4,609,292 4,618,581 -9,289

3.2 What are their characteristics?
If we take a look to the 2011 Spanish Population Census we can see that
the individual questionnaire contained 22 questions, which can be grouped
into eight blocks (basic demographic data, migrations, legal marital status and
dwelling composition, studies, care provided, fertility, current activity status
and mobility). Apart from that, the household questionnaire contained 7
questions about characteristics, facilities and equipment of the dwelling as
well as the tenure status.
The main objective of the 2016-PCF was precisely to try to replicate the 22
individual questions; that is, to investigate to what extent a register-based
census could at least contain the same level of detail as the 2011 census. It must
be taken into consideration that not all the questions of the 2011 Population
Census questionnaire have to be included in the 2021 census, in the same way
that questions have been appearing and disappearing in each census along the
years for many different reasons.
The first conclusion about the analysis of the 2016-PCF is that, regarding
to the population, all the variables that are compulsory according to the EU

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