Introduction
The Bureau of Statistics’ (BoS) Preliminary Population and Housing Census Report for 2012 announced a decline in the population from 751,223 persons at the 2002 Census to 747,884 persons. This created a political and economic bombshell of no mean order. Since that publication, I have been bombarded with queries from intrigued citizens. Most focus on seeking my estimation of what the population should have been in 2012, if population events over the intercensal period (2002-2012) had been “normal.” Today’s column offers a response to this questioning.
A word of caution, such questions implicitly attribute the population decline to outward emigration in the decade of the 2000s. I find this plausible, although the 2012 Preliminary Report does not examine fertility, mortality or death rates. When a similar decline in the population was identified for the first time in Guyana’s census history in the 1991 Census, the BoS indicated that this outcome was “consistent with the peak emigration flows recorded during the decade of the 1980s.”
Readers are also reminded the 2012 Report is preliminary; changes in the information presented in the Final Report could differ, as has
