4.7 million fewer inhabitants than the IBGE estimate

The 2022 Demographic Census, released this Wednesday (28), shows that Brazil has 203 million inhabitants. The number announced by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) has 4.7 million fewer people than the projection presented by the institute itself earlier. In December of last year, the IBGE estimated that the Brazilian population would be composed of 207.7 million inhabitants. This estimate of the agency was made with previous research data.

The interim president of the institute, Cimar Azeredo, pointed out that the survey had not been carried out for 12 years. Normally, the Census is carried out every ten years and should have been done in 2020, but it was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the cost of the operation. In addition, Azeredo pointed out that the population count in the middle of the decade, in 2015, was not carried out.

“We didn’t do a mid-decade count and that makes all the difference,” said the interim president. He pointed out that the difference between the estimated and announced was expected, but the IBGE did not imagine it would be “so high”, he said, according to a statement published by the Economic value.

“We already expected this difference. We could not imagine that it was so high, but we knew that it would make a difference in relation to the population that was being estimated”, he said. “This gives a denunciation; the importance of us doing a count in the middle of the decade”, she said.

Furthermore, since 2010, when the previous Census was carried out, the country’s population has grown by 6.5%, or 12,306,713 more people. “This results in an annual growth rate of 0.52%, the lowest ever observed since the beginning of the historical series started in 1872, the year of the first census operation in the country”, informed the IBGE.

“In 2022, the annual growth rate was reduced to less than half of what it was in 2010 (1.17%)”, said the technical coordinator of the Census, Luciano Duarte, in a note.

According to Azeredo, one of the databases used for the preview was the 2010 Census. “The preview was the best number at that time and we knew we would have distance [entre a projeção e o número oficial do Censo, sobre população do país]”, he pointed.

He stated that indices such as migration, fertility and mortality still need to be analyzed so that the agency can better explain the population difference. The same is true of the impact of Covid-19 death numbers, which will be analyzed by the researchers. The expectation is that the IBGE will release the second block of information from the 2022 Census at the end of July.

In February of this year, the IBGE released the Civil Registry Statistics for 2021. According to the data, the number of deaths grew 18.0% in 2021, about 273 thousand more deaths than in 2020, totaling about 1. 8 million and reaching a new record in the series: it was the highest absolute number and the highest percentage change compared to the previous year, since 1974.

The same survey, released at the beginning of the year, shows that the number of births fell by 1.6% in Brazil. There were about 43,000 fewer births, close to 2.6 million, the lowest level in the series since 2003, when there was a methodological change in the indicator.