Research Project T01

MIGRAT quality review - checking the Eurostat's migration statistics database

Project Manager from the CEFMR part: Dorota Kupiszewska

Project funded through the Eurostat call for tenders (2002/S 133-103745/EN) - Lot 3, and executed by the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI), the Hague, of which the CEFMR was a subcontractor.

For a number of years, Eurostat has collected statistics on international migration from national statistical institutes and other authorities in the EU and EFTA Member States, from the Central European Countries, and from other selected countries in the Mediterranean region (Israel, Malta, Turkey and Cyprus at present). The statistics are collected by means of a questionnaire, which is sent to national statistical institutes. The statistics provided have been validated by successive contractors working for the Eurostat Population team, and are made available to users on the MIGRAT domain of New Cronos, Eurostat's reference database.

A high priority for Eurostat is the quality of its statistical databases. However, Eurostat is aware of the potential for improving the quality of the migration database. Problems have occurred for numerous reasons - changes of contractor, errors and omissions in the data provided by the countries, errors and omissions in data validation and loading onto the database, non-availability of the requested information (statistics and metadata), transfer to a different database system, etc. Eurostat therefore has decided to undertake a detailed review of the quality of the MIGRAT domain - including the accuracy and completeness of the database, and to attempt to improve the quality by filling gaps and correcting errors in the statistics and metadata.