Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Royal Gazette announcement of population numbers 2017

Last Friday, the population numbers for each province were officially announced in the Royal Gazette. The numbers were already online on January 1st on stat.dopa.go.th
 as reported here before, so there shouldn't have been any news about this - but oddly there are some differences. Whereas the total numbers are same, the numbers by nationality (Thai or foreigner) differ. These numbers are a bit hidden on stat.dopa.go.th, as they are only listed with the age pyramid data (see my blog post). For the whole country, the Gazette announcement states that there are 875,814 foreigners, whereas the age pyramid data states there are only 680,549.

The difference is that there two more rows in that statistics - the people who are currently moving, i.e. have unregistered at their old registrar but not yet registered at a new location. These are 157,722 people. The even bigger number are 722,717 who are registered only at the central registrar (ทะเบียนบ้านกลาง), but not at any local one. Thus most of the "missing" foreigners are only centrally registered, and thus don't show up as foreigners in the age statistics. I now have to think a bit how to best encode this fact in my XML files, and of course also clean up the previous years for which I already imported one of the numbers.