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Population and society

Introduction

Ensuring just and equitable access to all the benefits of sustainable development, without leaving anyone behind, depends on information about the huge diversity of individuals and groups in our societies. Social and demographic statistics help us to know how many of us there are, how and where we live, how we move between places, the circumstances of our lives and the inequalities among groups, including children, older persons and across genders.

We produce and promote methodological guidance, develop national capacities, and foster the sharing of experience and expertise to better understand our societies through modern, efficient production of social and demographic statistics.

Key areas of work

Icon with magnifying glass and people to represent censuses

Population and housing censuses

Migration

Poverty and inequality

Gender

Children

In focus

There’s a growing shift in official statistics, towards using administrative data sources to replace or complement traditional surveys. These sources aren’t collected for statistics, but for things like health, education, tax, birth and death registration, and so on. They have many advantages, such as not having to burden the public with lots of questions. But they bring challenges too — including ensuring that statistics based on these sources don’t miss out certain parts of the population: very small groups; people with characteristics that aren’t yet clearly defined; undocumented migrants or people involved in illegal activities; people living in remote areas or the homeless; and people who it’s hard to gather data on, e.g. because they are living with dementia or a disability, don’t speak the national language, or are too young or too old to be able to provide data to administrative systems. When we use these sources to produce statistics about society, we must take extra care to ensure no-one is left behind.

This is why our Task Force on Hard-to-reach groups in administrative sources is gathering experiences from across the region to put together a list of best practices and a conceptual framework for identifying and including the groups most commonly left out of admin sources. Their findings and recommendations will be presented to the Conference of European Statisticians for endorsement in 2025.

Highlights

At its most recent meeting in October 2024, our CES Bureau approved the establishment of a new Steering Group to coordinate work on statistics on children. We'll be working with experts to identify data gaps and develop a minimum set of indicators on the thre priority areas of violence against children, children in alternative care, and children with disabilities.
Censuses gather information about all the people who live in a country and the homes they live in. Faced with rapid change across our region in how this information is collected or compiled, more than 150 census experts are working with us in our biggest ever project to revise and update our guidance for the next round of censuses.
Measuring migration is never simple: it’s hard to count people when they don’t stay in one place, especially if they cross borders, and even more so if they don’t want to be counted. Our Task Force on Measuring Emigration and Task Force on Defining and Measuring New Forms of International Migration are bringing together experts to share learning and develop best practices.