Improvements of Techniques to Estimate Migration Rates: An Application with Brazilian Censuses Data

This paper intends to develop procedures which can be applied to different countries and databases to estimate migration rates using information on place of previous residence (last-move data) and duration of residence. For this, some modifications are proposed to previous methods, in order to improve the measurement of migration rates. Other estimations were calculated with information on place of residence at some fixed date in the past. Results suggest that estimations with improved techniques using last-move data give similar results to those ones provided by techniques based on place of residence from a specified number of years preceding the Census enumeration. As a demonstration, 1970, 1980, 1991 and 2000 Brazilian Censuses are used to estimate both sets of rates.