Apostol Simovski, the current director of the State Statistical Office at the panel discussion “Census: Between politics and statistics” organized by CIVIL said that the preparations for the census began long ago and that the census is not done for a short period of a month or a year, but that it takes a long time.
“Preparations started a long time ago, the census is not done in a month or two or a year, it takes a long time, of course based on knowledge, experience and needs for this information, what hinders is the law, yesterday the debate started, yesterday was the first reading and in the next period we expect the details, I hope that the subjects in the parliament will pass this law and there will be no contradictions, this is an operation that should bring benefit to the citizens of the country. We are finishing the preparations from a technical aspect, this census will be specific, it will not be in the traditional way, we will use a combined method,” said Simovski.
Simovski added that unlike previous years, this year there will be electronic questionnaires on laptops and there will be communication with automatic databases from where the data will be downloaded and supplemented from the field.
“If you are employed somewhere in a business entity, we will have data from three databases, and there is no need to ask in the field about that and we will not bother the population with that data. This gives great quality to the census and shortens the implementation time, and for us the most important thing is that it gives the fastest results, and now as it is stated in the law, we should come out with the data after 6 months “, added Simovski.
According to him, this will be a much better set of collected data and will be data that can be used for planning, almost all preparations are completed, the law that is very important remains to be adopted, to form regional commissions for conducting the census .
