Estimating census and death registration completeness.

This article presents a new method for estimating the relative completeness of 2 census enumerations and of intercensal registered deaths. The Growth Balance Equation was developed by Brass (1975) to estimate the completeness of death registration relative to the completeness of census enumeration. The method presented here can be seen either as an extension of Martin's formulation to allow explicitly for changes in census coverage or as a modification of Brass's method to use deaths by age group rather than deaths by cohort, preferable on the grounds that age group comparisons will be less distorted by age misreporting than cohort comparisons if the patterns of age misreporting are similar for 2 successive censuses. This simple method estimates simultaneously the relative coverage of the 2 censuses and the completeness of registration of intercensal deaths. The key assumptions of the method are that the population is closed to migration and that all the coverage factors involved are invariant with age, at least for the age range studied. Analysis of the sensitivity of the estimates to the assumptions and further work on extending the method to open populations would be useful.