Reducing Costs of Censuses in Norway Through Use of Administrative Registers

"For some years it has been the policy of Statistics Norway to collaborate with various governmental agencies in order to use administrative registers in statistics production. This policy has been supported politically, and a new Statistics Act has been useful in these efforts. The purpose of this paper is to present the strategy and methodology used to produce statistics in general, census statistics in particular, when based on a combined use of administrative registers and directly collected data. Experiences from Norwegian censuses since 1960 will be presented."