Having celebrated its 70th anniversary in May, IBGE promises to keep up with its good work, which includes the conduction of 2, 000 household interviews for the Monthly Employment Survey per day, the daily data collection which provides 3,000 prices for the calculation of IPCA, and also the monitoring of the agricultural production in each of the 5564 Brazilian municipalities.

To all this can be added the monthly data collection from the 3,700 Brazilian industrial units which form the group covered by the Monthly Survey of Industry and the from the 7,600 commercial companies which compose the sample for the Monthly Survey of Trade.

Besides, there is the monthly data collection for the National System of Costs Survey and Indexes of Construction, involving 8,000 informants (with activities in trade, industry, organizations and construction companies) and the survey of prices of 8,800 inputs, in order to generate a total of 46 thousand pieces of information about the costs of construction in all the federative units in the country.

Together with all this work is the myriad of information on births, deaths, marriages and divorces, sent to IBGE by all the Brazilian law offices, in order to compose the statistics of the Civil Register. Besides, there are the surveys of the Register of Enterprises –gathering information about all the enterprises which have obtained or cancelled their National Register of Legal Entities (CNPJ).

Throughout the year, there is also the collection of data for the most important annual surveys of IBGE: Trade, Services, Industry, Construction Industry, Technological Innovation and Agriculture and Livestock, among others. With these pieces of information, IBGE develops the Quarterly National Accounts, in order to determine the change rates and the figures for the Gross Domestic Product, the amount of all the wealth produced in the country, every three months. The same calculation, extended and checked, is done annually for the National Accounts. These numbers are turned into information about the wealth produced in each of the 27 Federative Units – National Accounts – and of the 5,564 Brazilian municipalities – Municipal Accounts.  

All the city governments are also visited by IBGE, for the collection of information about public administration, finance, environment, housing, culture and sports activities for the Survey of Basic Municipal Information.

At the same time, the institution proceeds with the collection of data about work, income, education, demography and other aspects related to the lives of Brazilian families, through visits to a total of more than 140 thousand households spread all over the 27 Federative Units. That is IBGE’s National Household Sample Survey, the biggest investigation of this type carried out in the country. It provides information used in the Summary of Social Indicators and in a number of other studies performed by the United Nations, Getúlio Vargas Foundation, IPEA, Dieese, Unicamp, UFRJ and other important national and international institutions. 

Every 5 years, IBGE releases the Consumer Expenditure Survey – POF, which investigates the consumption habits of Brazilian families. There are detailed investigations for 12 months, with visits for several days to over 44 thousand households, where researchers investigate even the height and weight of the interviewees. All that is done in order to detect the main items consumed in the everyday diet of Brazilians and also to keep updated data about the items whose prices are investigated in the calculation of inflation.

Every ten years in Brazil there is a study in which all the households are visited: in 2000 they were 52 million and in each one of them someone answered the questionnaires of the IBGE’s Demographic Census.

Regular frequency of the Brazilian demographic census is the main highlight

European countries have had censuses since feudal times, once landlords at that time needed to know how many taxpayers lived in the area controlled by them. The USA census has existed since 1970. Brazil is one of the countries in the world which conducts censuses regularly. The first two censuses occurred in 1872 (when the country was still ruled by Emperor D. Pedro II) and in 1890 (the first census of the Republic). Since then there have been interruptions only in 1910 and 1930, and a postponement in 1991. 

Since the foundation of IBGE, in 1936, the statistical surveys in the country has become more regular and received more support from the State. The Census of 1940 reflected this change: it was the first one elaborated according to internationally-acknowledged methodologies and it had the cooperation of renowned statisticians, such as the Italian Giorgio Mortara, who came to Brazil escaping from Mussolini’s regime. The Census of 1940 was an international landmark, once, for the first time in the entire world, two crucial matters would be investigated by the same demographic census: fertility and child mortality.

International acknowledgement

Today, IBGE is one of the most distinguished statistical organizations in the world and has participated actively in a series of international forums. It is worth mentioning here the annual meetings of the United Nations Statistics Division and of  the OECD Statistics Committee, besides the Conference of European Statisticians. IBGE also participates regularly of a series of events promoted by the UNWTO, ILO, WHO, ECLAC, UNECE, etc.

It is also worth mentioning the recent nomination of IBGE to preside the Committee of Statistics of the World Tourism Organization – OMT and the invitation Brazil received to become the observant member to the OECD Statistics Committee.

The avant-garde of computerization

Throughout the1960’s, IBGE was computerized. One of the first computers in Brazil – occupying an area of over 300 square meters and weighing  almost 30 tons – was bought for the institute and used to process data investigated by the 1970 Census. Nowadays IBGE has an extensive network of microcomputers which connect its over 500 agencies all over the country. These are also connected to the Internet, through which the main statistics released by the institute are made available.

The IBGE site on the Internet (www.ibge.gov.br) has 43,411 pages, more than 35 thousand zipped files and it offers free download of PDF files of all the publications released by the institute, besides technical information, methodologies and questionnaires adopted in our surveys. In 2005, this web site was visited by over 876 million people, with more than 10 million users, responsible for 177 million downloads.

Palms Tops in IPCA and in PME

One of the main surveys of IBGE – and the biggest monthly investigation about work conducted in the country – the Monthly Employment Survey is already using palm tops in the data collection promoted in more than 40 thousand households, in the six main metropolitan areas in the country. There are about 500 palmtops used to collect information from more than 130 thousand persons, throughout over 13 thousand hours of interviews which result in about 970 monthly indicators about the job market.

The price collection for IPCA will be the next survey of IBGE to have palmtops. The logistics of this technical evolution – which involves 300 agents collecting prices of 512 items in nine metropolitan areas, two municipalities and the Federal District, even on weekends –  has already been developed, and the implementation only depends on the purchase of palmtops. Thus, the almost 93 thousand prices collected by IBGE in order to measure the inflation indexes (IPCA and INPC), which require the hard work of typists, will be broadcast through the Internet, directly from palms to computers in the headquarters of the institute, in Rio de Janeiro.

In 2007, IBGE will conduct the agricultural census and the counting of the population

The preparations for the Counting of the Population – which was expected to start in 2005 – and of the Agricultural Census, which will investigate all the rural properties in the country and was expected to begin in 2006, have already begun. The data from these surveys, on which about R$ 500 million is expected to be spent, are essential to the updating of economic and demographic information which contribute to the establishment of several public policies and function as parameters to IBGE itself.

Both studies will include the temporary hiring of thousands of survey agents and will use what the latest  technology of data collection, including palms and the use of GPS for the mapping of rural properties.

Geosciences as a very active field

In the field of geography, IBGE is working on the mapping of the country and on the management of the main projects for the modernization of basic parameters of this sector. Among them are the Change of the National Geodetic Reference System for the implementation of the Geocentric Reference System for the Americas – SIRGAS and the Modernization of the Brazilian Network of Satellites Monitoring of the GPS system.

The Political Map of Brazil, sized 2.20 x 2.20 meters (scale 1: 2 500 000) and of the Collection of Maps of Amazonia, bringing ten thematic maps of natural resources is expected to be released. The same happens to The National Map of Sanitation (scale 1: 5000 000, with data about the demographic density and the sewage collection system) and the Brazilian Agricultural Map (scale 1: 5000 000), with the distribution of  agricultural production and natural vegetation.

Another very interesting publication will be the Atlas of Literary Representations of Brazilian Regions, showing aspects of the areas which were used as setting in the most important works of regionalist literature.

Political and Physical Maps of the states and regions of Brazil will also be published. The highlight will be the updated edition of Municipal Maps, for statistical surveys about the 5,564 Brazilian municipalities.

In the environmental field, there will be editions of the Maps of Relief Features and of the Maps of Federal Preservation Units, the Maps of Coverage and Use of Land, of Vegetation, of Geomorphology and Soils of the states of Acre, Rondônia, Roraima and the Biogeography of the Savannah.