Estimating International Migration on the Base of Small Area Techniques

Population migration flow is a component of population facing difficulties in measuring in the inter-census period of time. The rationale of this study is that Romanian statistics on international migration flows are of very poor quality, the availability of data on past trends being strongly limited, provided only from administrative sources. For this reason, in the inter-census period, the variable of interest is provided by the labour force survey available at national and regional level every quarter of the year since 2004. The smaller disaggregation like localities level using direct estimators conducts to results of unreliable estimates and will surely lead to higher standard error and consequently, high coefficients of variation. The main reason for this is the insufficient number of respondents or no respondent at all in a small domain. Small area estimation techniques are able to carry out the estimation at the localities level (NUTS 5). The main purpose is to provide methods able to estimate the population in Romania, based on the Labour Force Survey and also the results of 2002, respectively 2011 population census.