Demographer: access to banks’ transactional information would allow for a more accurate estimate of Ukraine’s population

In 2019, Ukraine took the first step toward using mobile operator data to estimate the population, an attempt to introduce an “electronic census.” However, according to Ella Libanova, Director of the Institute for Demography and Social Studies, this methodology is only partial, and combining mobile operator data with bank transaction information could significantly fill in the gaps. However, the National Bank is currently blocking this possibility. Libanova told about this in a comment to a journalist of UNN.

“In 2019, there was the first attempt to use data from mobile operators for an ‘electronic census,’ but this is not a census, it’s just an estimate of the population, but then we worked out the methodology,” Libanova says.

According to her, this is still not the ideal way to conduct a census, because not everyone uses mobile phones and there is also the problem of the towers themselves, namely how they are located. In addition, Libanova says that the first attempt to conduct a census through operators was free, and then it was necessary to pay.

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“We are trying to compensate for the situation with the information we receive from various sources that are available in Ukraine. In my opinion, the best register is the Pension Fund’s register, but there is one source for which I don’t know who to ask anymore, where there is unique information – banks, namely transactions,” Libanova said.

She believes that if transactional information and information from mobile operators were combined, it would be enough to estimate the population more accurately.

The director of the Institute for Demography and Social Studies emphasized that there is no question of data personalization.

“I can’t understand why the banks are resisting, because no one needs data on each person, because it is a bank secret,” she emphasized.

However, the National Bank of Ukraine, as a regulator, does not support this idea.

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