Census

A census (from the Latin censere, 'to assess') is the procedure of systematically acquiring, recording, and calculating information about the members of a given population, which is then usually presented through statistics. This term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses. Other common censuses include censuses of agriculture, traditional culture, businesses, supplies, and traffic censuses. The United Nations (UN) defines the essential features of population and housing censuses as "individual enumeration, universality within a defined territory, simultaneity, and defined periodicity", and recommends that population censuses be conducted at least every ten years. UN recommendations also cover census topics to be collected, official definitions, classifications, and other information to coordinate international practices. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), in turn, defines the census of agriculture as "a statistical operation for collecting, processing and disseminating data on the structure of agriculture, covering the whole or a significant part of a country." "In a census of agriculture, data are collected at the holding level." The word is of Latin origin: during the Roman Republic, the census was a list of all adult males fit for military service. The modern census is essential for international comparisons of all types of statistics, and censuses collect data on many attributes of a population, not just the number of individuals. Censuses typically began as the only method of collecting national demographic data and are now part of a larger system of different surveys. Although population and citizenship estimates remain an important function of a census, including the exact geographic distribution of the population or the agricultural population, statistics can be produced on combinations of attributes, e.g., education by age and sex in different regions. Current administrative data systems allow for other approaches to enumeration with the same level of detail but raise...