Analysts: doing the census in 2024 implies risking the data and creating confrontation

The warnings were made in the Conversation “And what happened to the Census?”, organized by the Fides News Agency (ANF), the Ignatian Spirituality Center and the Fourth Intermediate Magazine with the participation of the sociologist and political scientist María Teresa Zegada and the economists María del Carmen Ledo and Teresa Polo.

The decision of the Government of Luis Arce to hold the Population and Housing Census in 2024 entails risks for obtaining the data and the political climate because it is a pre-election year and will cause confrontation between regions because the results will serve to define future budget allocations, analysts warned.

The warnings were made in the Conversation “And what happened to the Census?”, organized by the Fides News Agency (ANF), the Ignatian Spirituality Center and the Fourth Intermediate Magazine with the participation of the sociologist and political scientist María Teresa Zegada and the economists María del Carmen Ledo and Teresa Polo.

“These issues have unfortunately been politicized in the country. They are taking us to a cliff if we do not react as citizens. Everything that happens in Bolivia is politicized, polarized, and we are going to enter an early electoralization as has happened in previous crises” Zegada warned.

Bolivia will hold national elections in 2025, the year in which the bicentennial of its foundation will also be commemorated.

The analyst said that the panorama is “very confused” and “contaminated” on the part of the Government and the opponents faced by the date of the census, which in principle was set by the Executive for next November, although it later decided that it be postponed to 2024, while the opposing forces claim that it will be in 2023.

In this context, Zegada said that former President Evo Morales accused the demonstrations in favor of the year 2023 of being part of an alleged coup conspiracy, while the political and civic leaders of Santa Cruz have carried out a 48-hour citizen strike to demand that year holding demographic survey.

The political scientist also said that the reasons for the postponement to 2024 are not only technical, as the Executive alleges, but political, and that is why the Government also has the possibility of doing it in 2023 to avoid greater polarization in the country.

He pointed out that the government of Luis Arce could have pointed out to those responsible that the planning of the Census had not advanced, but he preferred silence and initially assured that it would be done this year, although later “when things are already burning” he argued that it would not there were conditions and that even the rainy season would harm the event.

Economist Ledo stressed that “the risk of having the census in a pre-election moment is very great, not only because of the quality of the data, but because of everything it can mean.”

Political will, he said, is key to carrying out the census as soon as possible because if it is done in 2024, “uncomfortable noise” would be generated and the data would only be known in 2025 or 2026, which also causes great damage to planning and social and economic research currently still using 2012 data.

To illustrate the delay and lack of awareness in Bolivia about the urgency of speeding up the census, he said that recently the Chilean Minister of Planning indicated at a Latin American event that he was concerned because the last census carried out in his country dated from 2017 and the figures could already be considered very old.

Ledo, who is an expert in demography, pointed out that the Census has “transcendental importance” in a country like Bolivia, where there is no continuous data to properly carry out development planning and that it should be carried out every ten years, although in none of the cases previous conditions have been met.

The expert made several technical warnings for the three stages of a national survey: the preparatory stage, the census moment, and the post-census phase.

He pointed out that all the censuses in Bolivia are de facto, which means that all the people who slept in the house the night before are counted, but many countries already work with the right census, consisting of including as a member of the household who he’s absent. This would help mitigate the risk of migratory circularity, typical of the country.

He also warned about the confusion that exists when talking about housing and home and the risk of mixing “house, hut and pahuichi” as happened in the 2001 and 2012 censuses, for which he recommended returning to the 1976 scheme when “the house independent, the apartment, the single room, the shack, the pahuichi, the improvised house” with the purpose of knowing the true quantitative housing deficit.

In the same way, review the types of households, add queries about Covid to have references for health care and home ownership if it is paid or mortgaged, or the characteristics of employment and occupational categories.

Ledo also asked to include teachers and university students as enumerators to have better quality information since it is likely that college students cannot guarantee adequate data collection, he said.

Teresa Polo, also an economist, underlined the importance and usefulness of good data collection because census information makes it possible to improve the allocation of resources, identify vulnerable populations, characterize the labor force and build indicators on the population to measure social inequalities and between groups. .

Likewise, the census information is used to establish the number of representatives before the Legislative Assembly and define the amount of economic resources that must be transferred to the municipalities and for tax co-participation, which is an issue that is causing alerts between the eastern and southern regions. West.

Analysts: doing the census in 2024 implies risking the data and creating confrontation