IPUMS Europe: Integrating the Region's Microdata

IPUMS-Europe 2004-08.

Institution: Minnesota Population Center.

Principal investigators: Robert McCaa, Steven Ruggles, Matt Sobek, Miriam King, Deborah Levison.

Funding: National Institutes of Health, Grant HD047283.

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The National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development have awarded the Minnesota Population Center (MPC) a major grant to undertake a five-year initiative to create integrated and fully documented samples of over fifty European censuses and micro-censuses from the 1960s to the present. The project will join the census microdata of Austria, Belarus, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, and the United Kingdom to the IPUMS-International integrated data series, which currently includes data from France as well as China, Colombia, Kenya, Mexico, the United States, and Vietnam. Samples from Belgium, Italy, Poland, Russia, and Turkey will also be incorporated pending written authorization from the national statistical agencies. These 19 countries represent over three-quarters of the population of Europe, and the resulting data series will offer excellent opportunities for research on a variety of topics, including analysis of population aging, economic transformation, demographic change, and international migration. Preliminary releases may begin as early as 2006; the final integrated microdata series is scheduled for release in 2009. It will include between 50 and 60 datasets representing up to 70 million persons. A large number of housing, population, and economic variables are available for virtually every country, making the series particularly useful for a wide range of research projects.