Monday, March 10, 2014

Population census data since 1960

While working on adding the census 2010 data into my spreadsheet, I noticed that for many provinces I already had the exact population numbers since 1960, however not for all yet. Some of the PDF files with the census results for each province published after the 2000 census had the population history listed. So I tried the same trick which helped me to find the 2010 results - simply put a few of the numbers into Google together with the Thai province name and see if it has some hits.

What I found were some data pages from a Chulalongkorn university study, which listed data on elderly people from the censuses, including the total population. For example with the page on Surat Thani - one of the provinces where I did not have the exact data before - showed the total population in the 1960 census was 324,784, and grew to 747,049 in 1990. The more recent datapoints were then taken from the registration data. Once I filled all the holes, the sum however did not match with the total number, which took some time to finally spot those provinces where I had entered the number wrongly in past - or where the PDF had a mistake, I did not verify back with that one.

Just one thing did not add up correctly - 1960 and 1960 there were still the two provinces Phra Nakhon and Thonburi, which were merged into the special administrative area Bangkok in the early 1970s. The Chulalongkorn data had separate data for Thonburi and Phra Nakhon, but the numbers don't add to the value listed at the NSO as the regional sum.
YearPhra NakhonThonburiSumNSO
19601,577,003559,3762,136,3792,136,435
19702,157,303920,0333,077,3363,077,361
It is just a difference of 56 and 25 respectively, so the numbers are really close. Sadly, this final step I wasn't able to find on the net, so I have to wait until I can visit the National Library in Bangkok to check out the corresponding issues of the NSO publication - I only have the 1960 Chiang Mai issue depicted above. If anyone has access to these publication and can find it for me it'd be nice. But since Thonburi had no TIS1099 geocode, I cannot get this into my XML style anyway.

For the older censuses I wasn't able to find the data for each province - while Statoids has numbers listed, the sum 17,256,840 given there is not the same as found in the NSO table, according to that the total population in the 1947 census was 17,442,689.

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