Economic and Population Statistics Unit.pdfVIP

Population Estimates for Non-standard Geographical Areas. The Small Area Pilot Project Alan Jenner Australian Bureau of Statistics Economic and Population Statistics Unit GPO Box 796 Sydney, NSW 1041 Phone: 02 9268 4113 Fax: 02 9268 4805 Email:a.jenner@.au Introduction For a number of years the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has provided a significant amount of census data in Geographic Information System (GIS) ready format. However, the spatial units upon which the data is based has not always been conducive to user needs, due to its reliance on standard geography. With the increasing interest in census-based data in other geographic forms, the NSW office of the ABS instigated the Small Area Pilot Project. This project explored the feasibility of producing population and other statistics from census data for geographical areas other than those normally provided by the ABS. Information about the spatial distribution of population is widely used for major decisions in areas such as health, transportation, retail and urban planning. The present provision of this data through the ABS uses standard geography whilst the needs of government and non-government agencies often digresses from these standards towards areal units. Whilst ABS geography is based on the Collection District (CD), a unit small enough for a census collector to reasonably distribute and gather census information, user data needs often require information below that level or transecting across CD boundaries. Even when the users area of interest is much larger than a CD, a simple aggregation of CDs may not always meet the us