Territorial differences between the data of the current population registration and the results of the 2020 Census

Abstract

The article analyzes population data by federal districts, subjects and municipalities of the Russian Federation, obtained from two different official sources of Rosstat for close dates: data from the current population registration as of January 1, 2022 and data from the All-Russian Population Census of 2020, the control point of which was October 1, 2021. Since population size changes rather slowly, theoretically these data should not differ significantly. In fact, it has turned out that the population size across the country, according to various data, differs by more than 1% (by 1.6 million people in the direction of the census data). The lower the level of administrative division, the greater the differences. At the level of some municipalities of the Russian Federation, the differences make almost 2 times. Moreover, with approximately equal frequency, there are both municipalities where, according to the census, the population is greater than according to the current population registration, and with the opposite situation. The article identifies the administrative units of the country where the differences between the census data and the current population registration are the largest, and the causes of the differences in one direction or another. The largest “overweight” of the population in favor of the census was found in the municipalities of the Central Federal District (especially in the Moscow urban agglomeration), and the maximum “shortage” of the population compared to the current accounting data was in the Far Eastern and Siberian Federal Districts.