Statistical framework for fully register based population counts

The increasing availability of registers or administrative archives has been a strong push towards moving from traditional censuses to combined censuses or even completely register based censuses. In this context, a statistical framework needs to be designed in order to delineate all the statistical issues of the new estimation process. To this aim, a population frame needs to be defined for both surveying and estimation phases. Sampling surveys should be designed for quality assessment and for improving the quality of the register based estimation process. Drawing on similar experiences, a formalisation of the population size estimation process fully based on administrative data is presented. An application to Italian estimation process is reported.