The growth of the Argentine population is “positive and moderate”, despite the fact that there is a decrease in the birth rate, demography specialists assured Télam based on the provisional results of the 2022 National Census, which showed an increase of almost 18% compared to 2010, which can be explained by the influence of immigration and the aging process.
“It is a moderate growth typical of Argentina’s long-term trend, and it is positive growth in the sense that it allows the aging process to be lengthened,” explained Leandro González, doctor of demography and researcher at Conicet, to Télam.
“The aging of the population refers to the fact that there is gradually more adult and elderly population, and when there is moderate population growth like ours, that process slows down,” continued the professor from the National University of Córdoba (UNC ).
We are 47,327,407, according to the trend of the field operation of the @Census2022. What do I do if I did not receive a visit from my census taker? We tell you all the options in #podcastINDEC and, as always, the statistics of the week: https://t.co/ZMb5tmwarG pic.twitter.com/NJMT2U6urW
— INDEC Argentina (@INDECArgentina) May 20, 2022
According to the first provisional results of the 2022 Census released Thursday night by the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (Indec), the Argentine population is 47,327,407 peoplewith a growth of almost 18% on the previous survey carried out 12 years ago.
Of the total current population, 47.05% are male and the 52.83% womenwhile the 0.12% was not associated with either of these two sexes.
For González, the moderate population growth is “positive because it gives governments more time to make forecasts of health and social welfare policies aimed at financing and caring for the elderly population, which is going to be growing over time”.
In turn, the researcher indicated that this growth was higher than what was expected by the INDEC projections, which estimated a population of 46,234,830 people for this year.
“It may seem like a lot of population, one million more than expected, but we are still in the order of a 2 to 5% difference between the result and the forecasts, so they are relatively low percentages that are within the foreseeable margins of error” , he detailed.
Regarding the reasons for this increase, González clarified that “We should wait to have more information computed by the INDEC to see if the growth of the population is due to international immigrants”.
On this point, he expanded: “The populations grow basically due to births, and births in Argentina have been on a downward trend since 2015, so it would be rare for there to have been a strong increase in births last year that would explain this difference” .
“If there is growth due to immigrants, they generally come at young ages and reinforce the workforce in the labor market”Leandro González, doctor in demography and researcher at Conicet
“When the information on the place of residence and births is processed, perhaps we could have a clue that explains this growth,” added the demographer from the Center for Research and Studies on Culture and Society (Ciecs) dependent on Conicet and the UNC.
The researcher affirmed that “if there is growth due to immigrants, they generally come at a young age and reinforce the workforce in the labor market”, and remarked that “the entire active population supports the elderly population”.
Although our country does not have an aging population as in the case of Cuba or Uruguay, González indicated that “we are in the process of aging, but not to a marked degree, which gives time to plan policy changes.”
Regarding the difference between the number of men and women, he explained that it shows a “normal relationship” compared to the previous census, but a “small percentage growth in favor of women” can be observed.
“Naturally, women have a higher life expectancy than men, and here we could suspect that the pandemic may have contributed to this percentage growth because there was more mortality in men than in women,” he specified.
“We are in the process of aging, but not to a marked degree, which gives time to plan policy changes”Leandro González, doctor in demography and researcher at Conicet
In this sense, the researcher from the Migration Studies area of the Gino Germani Institute, Victoria Mazzeo, agreed that population growth with respect to INDEC forecasts was “more or less high, with a million more people.”
“If we analyze the vegetative growth (the difference between birth and mortality) is not that high; mortality remains stable and the birth rate has been declining since 2015. In 2019 the rate (of births) was 13.9 (per thousand inhabitants) and in 2020, 11.8″, explained the doctor in Social Sciences and Master in Social Demography.
For Mazzeo, the population growth of almost 18 percent can be linked to two aspects. “Due to migratory growth or due to over-registration based on the greater number of people who were able to access the census through the new digital methodology” that the Indec used for the first time in this census edition.
The researcher highlighted that “The number of people who were digitally registered was important”a total of 23,813,773, according to the Indec.
“The results of the Census serve to know how we are at a given moment, to have an idea of the type of population, to make good public policies and to know which populations to target”Victoria Mazzeo, researcher at the Gino Germani Institute
At that point, the researcher stressed the importance of obtaining data from a National Census to determine if there are more migrants “because there is usually no continuous data, only entries and exits to the country, and if these census data are crossed with those of 2010 That will be known.”
Finally, Mazzeo stressed that the importance of the Census results lies in “knowing how we are at a given moment, to have an idea of the type of population, make good public policies and know which populations to target and where they are located.”
“It is a universal survey, at the same time throughout the country, different from some surveys that do not take the rural population”he concluded.
