On 1 October 2018, in accordance with the European development policies and within its modernization program, Istat launched the permanent censuses project.
The 2010-2011 census round ended an era in the history of public statistics: that of general censuses that, every ten years, would go deep into the heart of the country and describe its features in a thorough and detailed way.
For the first time, the traditional ten-yearly survey of the main characteristics of the country’s resident population and its social and economic conditions will be carried out on an annual basis.
Unlike the past, the new permanent census of population and housing will not involve all households, but a representative sample of them. Nearly 1,400,000 households resident in 2,800 Italian municipalities will be selected for survey every year.
The focus of this project, indeed, is to integrate archive data, create statistical registers and conduct supporting statistical surveys, in line with the new organizational, technological and methodological model aimed at fully exploiting data already available.
The objective is to increase the amount and quality of information and emphasize its multidimensionality, in order to reduce the response burden on citizens and economic operators and contain the overall cost of production of official statistics.