The State Statistical Office insists that this operation be statistical and no different. We are firmly determined to persevere to the end, this operation to be only statistical, and all citizens to benefit from it, said the director of the State Statistical Office Apostol Simovski at the panel discussion of CIVIL “How can the census be (mis)used “.

– Everything else will be just a pity – not to have a census, as we do not have for 20 years. Most of the citizens do not even know the consequences. The census is necessary for many institutions. Local self-government, bases for any quality functioning of the local self-government, but also all other institutions. Education without census suffers, healthcare suffers, science suffers…

These data are necessary, everything else would be wrong information, said Simovski.

There was a lot of noise around the “resident” and “non-resident” categories. These are methodological elements, and should not be in law. MPs intervene in the law with amendments, and it may happen that certain international elements are changed with the intervention of MPs. That is why we did not put them in the law.

He claims that the census methodology and categories are “up to millimeter in line with international standards”

– The methodology says very precisely which persons fall into which category. In the units of coverage we have included our citizens who have been abroad for more than a year, in recent years various figures have been auctioned on how much our emigration is, we do not know the exact numbers, explains Simovski.