Every now and then, news appears in the media that, according to the calculations of city offices, any city has a lot more inhabitants than officially. Wrocław It is so expected to have 893,000 inhabitants alternatively of 674,000, and Warsaw nearly 2 million alternatively of 1.76 million (this analysis on behalf of the city was performed even by the subunit of the CSO!).
The request for specified studies comes of course from the fact that the Central Statistical Office encounters serious problems erstwhile calculating the number of population on a national scale, let alone on a local scale specified as a region or a municipality. Last year, very interesting. report Batory Foundation published about this. After publication of the report, his Response issued the GUS; besides held seminar on this subject with representatives of the Central Statistical Office and another guests. I will not be writing any more on this subject, but I encourage you to read the report.
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In this entry I tempted for an authorial analysis of the actual population for all counties in the country by state at the end of 2022. I think this is simply a very crucial topic, especially at the minute erstwhile funds from the National Reconstruction Plan are starting to flow to Poland. Our country may no longer have another chance to invest intensively in infrastructure, so it is worth building this infrastructure where it can benefit most people.
Below the results, and at the very end the methodology.
Some under 38 million Polish residents
At the end of 2022, the CSO gave the population of the country by national definition (including Polish emigrants not checked out from the country and not the majority of immigrants in Poland) to 37.77 million people, while the population of residents (in the explanation of the actual population, utilized for global comparisons) to somewhat over 1 million people less. However, in no of these figures the CSO included e.g. refugees from Ukraine1and many another categories of immigrants.
According to my calculations, the actual population of Poland at the end of 2022 was somewhat more than the authoritative data - 37.95 million people.
The authoritative and estimated population of voivodships besides varies. Almost all major voivodships gain – the exception is Silesian, but even there the difference is comparatively tiny (below 1%). This impression is made by the Mazovia region, which, according to these estimates, has already reached 6 million inhabitants, of course thanks to the capital. On the another hand, many smaller voivodships are much little populous than they would have been from authoritative data. The majority of residents — as many as 8.2% — fell to Podkarpackie.
Big 5 and all.
Even more interesting is the level of individual districts. Let's start with the large ones. Often, me and another observers of Polish demography are talking about “a large five”, that is Warsaw, Krakow, Wroclaw, Poznań and Gdańsk — cities that in the last decade or 2 “weak off” the remainder of the country. I urge my another entry in this topic:
Extreme CartographyAlso here we have a clear advantage of these cities. In Wrocław, the actual population can be up to 30% higher than the authoritative population; and in Poznań by small less. In Krakow we deal with a difference of 23%, while in Warsaw and Gdańsk about 17-18%.
In general, among the 20 largest cities in Poland, only Radom has less inhabitants than officially. The “Zyski” of these counties are so large that in general the cities under the laws of the territory have a population of 1.19 million more than officially. That's over 10% of their authoritative population!
In the case of land counties, these suburban ones besides mostly have more inhabitants. The evidence holder is the territory of Pruszkowski close Warsaw, which has about 12% more inhabitants than officially. In total, however, the local districts have far less inhabitants than the CSO says: 1.06 million less.
A Desolating Province
If we look at the map, we'll see very clearly what I wrote in the erstwhile section. In the largest cities and suburbs, we have far more inhabitants than officially. In smaller but university cities (e.g. Gliwice, Opole, Toruń), we will besides find a slight underestimation of the actual population. The last category is districts with a strong industrial, orchard or warehouse sector that attract immigrants — primarily districts along the A2 motorway in the west of the country and between Łódź and Warsaw.
Everywhere else, we have an estimation of the population in authoritative sources. From the light 1 in the Poznań-Bielsko-Warsaw triangle, to the larger 1 in the remaining districts of western and central Poland, to the very large 1 in Zamość, Podkarpacie and in the north-eastern runs of the country.
The exact values of actual population estimates for circumstantial districts are available under this link. I encourage you to search your county.
As I counted the actual population
To estimation the actual population in the districts, I adopted the following algorithm:
As a basis I took the authoritative population of districts according to the CSO data at the end of 2022
Then, from this number minus number of Polish expatriates surviving abroad and not checked out from the country (which is included in the figures from point 1), according to data from the National Census 2021. These data mention to 1.47 million Polish migrants. However, this is an underestimated number: data from statistical offices of another European countries talk about 2.1 million Poles who moved to these countries after 2004, of which 0.3 million officially checked out of Poland. In order to get these 1.8 million migrants (instead of 1.47 million), I have multiplied for all counties the number of migrants by 1.3, assuming that the CSO underestimated evenly across the country, which seems to me to be a reasonable assumption.
In the next step, I wanted to estimation the degree of undeclared migration inside The country. To this end, I utilized the data from the fresh elections: I added persons who have signed up for the electoral registry in the given territory before the elections, and minus Those who signed out to join elsewhere.
I besides considered utilizing another variable — the number of people working and “ commuters” to work more than 150 km in a consecutive line. But finally, I decided not to usage it, due to the fact that it seems to be somewhat worse than the voter register: not everyone is working, and of those who work, any are working remotely.
Time for foreigners. I added to each region the number of foreigners resident there paying wellness contributions to ZUS as at the end of 2022. Here I gotta add that any percent of them are already included in the authoritative population, so any of them can be counted double. However, this should not be a crucial value (only 111,000 foreigners, including children, pensioners and another non-employed people, are officially included in the population).
Foreigners aren't just laborers. Next step I added the number of foreigners pupils in the district, previously subtracting Those who are simultaneously war refugees from Ukraine.
This deduction from the erstwhile point I did due to the fact that any Ukrainian children do not go to Polish schools. So it was easier. add all Ukrainian children together than to calculate how much they walk and how much they don't. I added besides all refugees from Ukraine over 66 years of age.
For refugees from Ukraine, between 18 and 66 years of age, I assumed that it should add Only 35% of them. Why the number? According to the Polish economical Institute, 65% of Ukrainian refugees work — they are already included in the ZUS data. Of course, it is likely that 80% works in Warsaw, and only 50% in Zamość district, but we do not have specified accurate data.
Finally, at the end I added respectable number of students to counties with universities and minus estimated number of students studying elsewhere from all counties. I am least pleased with these calculations, due to the fact that the quality of available data was the lowest:
At region level, only information on the full number of students is available, without dividing into fixed and non-stationary and first or second degree. Additionally, any students were already included in the variable with the voter register.
There are many doubts, which is why in the data in addition to general respect, I besides share data without trying to estimation the number of students.
The map without students, however, looks very similar.
I am curious in your opinions on this analysis and methodology. I encourage you to leave a constructive comment!
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The CSO was the same statistical office in Europe that did not. However, according to the information provided by the office on X, refugees are to be yet counted among the Polish residents in the data at the end of 2023, which the CSO will print in April.
