The long-term absent residents in Catalonia. Who are they? What are their common characteristics?

Marc Ajenjo, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Albert Sabater, University of Manchester

The enumeration of the population in Spain is carried out through the census of population every ten years and the local population registers updated yearly. The importance of the latter is crucial in non-census years, as these population statistics are heavily used to distribute central government support to municipalities and to deliver a wide range of public services. However, these counts have been severely handicapped by the inclusion of long-term absent residents, a subgroup of the population whose individuals live away from the municipality where they are officially registered as residents. This paper aims to estimate and examine the common sociodemographic characteristics of long-term absent residents in Catalonia. The 2001 Census in Spain is the main source of data to estimate this subgroup of the population by municipalities. In order to describe the common sociodemographic characteristics of long-term absent residents in Catalonia, a logistic regression is implemented with the following predictor variables: age, sex, educational attainment, professional activity and socioeconomic category. For this analysis, a 20 per cent microdata sample with information collected about each person and housing unit from the 2001 Census is used. In general, this research aims to be a valuable exercise to prove that adjustments in population registers are needed due to the continued inclusion of long-term absent residents in local population registers. Due to the growing number of second homes, and more mobile populations, the impact of long-term absent residents is also expected to be increasingly significant, thus affecting the population bases required by good government.