IPUMS-International is a project dedicated to collecting and distributing census data from around the world. Its goals are to:
It is controlled by an international consortium of NSIs set up to anonymize, harmonise and distribute integrated census micro data samples to bona fide researchers. One of the first tasks was to inventory and preserve surviving machine-readable census micro data and documentation. In 2000, a census micro data inventory was published in Handbook of International Census Microdata for Population Research, edited by P. Kelly Hall, R. McCaa, and G. Thorvaldsen. A revised inventory is available on the web.
The Minnesota Population Center, where the project is located, has secured dissemination agreements from a large number of countries. A preliminary version of data and documentation from Colombia, France, Kenya, Mexico, the United States, and Vietnam were first made available in spring 2002. Additional variables and a new sample for 1982 China were added in March 2003. Samples for Brazil will be added in summer 2004. We have also reached agreements with over a dozen census agencies in Central and South America. Data from these countries form the basis of a new IPUMS-Latin America project, which began in mid-2003.
In Autumn 2004, a major project aimed at the creation of integrated and fully documented samples of over fifty European censuses and micro-censuses from the 1960s to the present received funding. The project will join the census micro data of Austria, Belarus, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, and the United Kingdom to the IPUMS-International integrated data series, which currently includes data from France as well as China, Colombia, Kenya, Mexico, the United States, and Vietnam. Samples from Belgium, Italy, Poland, Russia, and Turkey will also be incorporated pending written authorization from the national statistical agencies. These 19 countries represent over three-quarters of the population of Europe, and the resulting data series will offer excellent opportunities for research on a variety of topics, including analysis of population aging, economic transformation, demographic change, and international migration.
Preliminary releases may begin as early as 2006; the final integrated micro data series is scheduled for release in 2009. It will include between 50 and 60 datasets representing up to 70 million persons. A large number of housing, population, and economic variables are available for virtually every country, making the series particularly useful for a wide range of research projects.
The EU Sixth Framework Program will also support a three-year project to build a European web-based data dissemination extract site, housed at the Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, which will make the European micro data and metadata more widely available for scholarly and educational research.
For project information