The permanent population census and new opportunities for annual data dissemination at municipal level: a focus on employed persons by educational attainment in Italy’s large cities

Abstract

The Permanent Census of Population and Housing, now in its fourth edition, enables the annual dissemination of municipal-level data on topics related to population by sex, age and citizenship, educational attainment, current activity status, commuting for study or work, and households. The new census strategy, based on the integration of data from administrative sources and from sample surveys, ensures not only the traditional ten-year information supply, but also the ability to produce and share with users multidimensional tables aimed at micro-level territorial knowledge with unprecedented frequency and timeliness. Moreover, the incremental availability of information included in the thematic Registers of the Italian National Institute of Statistics and the opportunity to change annually the informative contents of sample surveys, allows the dissemination programme to be modified every year. The paper aims to explore the cognitive advantages arising from the new census strategy while also providing an example of the use of the data produced annually at the municipal level. We will see, also through the construction of gender- and citizenship-specific indicators, how the territory influences the distribution of the employment rate in relation to the highest educational level obtained in a comparison between residents in the 12 Italian cities with more than 250,000 inhabitants and those living in the other municipalities of the province.