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In particular, a team of international experts (including your blogger) supported by the United Nations World Population Fund (UNFPA) is acting as technical advisors to ensure that internationally accepted methodologies, practices and procedures are adopted in the 2014 census. In so doing it has sought the assistance of several international agencies as both advisors and sponsors. In Myanmar (formerly Burma), for example, the (now almost democratically elected) Government there has just carried out the first census in over 30 years. Of course, for some countries the census is a long-standing institution (the first British census, for example, was taken in 1801, and in the USA as early as 1790), and perhaps little guidance is now needed in order for national statistical offices in these countries to regularly carry out the enumeration and data processing, while for others the whole operation is a much more recently adopted process.
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The latest revision to these Principles and Recommendation were approved by the UN Statistical Commission at its 46 th Session in New York in March. But just carrying out a census, per se, is not enough in order to strive for a high degree of harmonisation of definitions, concepts and classifications between international censuses, the UN periodically prepares a set of Principles and Recommendations on how countries should carry out the decennial census in order to ensure comparability of statistical outputs.
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According to the United Nations only a handful of countries did not do so during the course of the UN’s World Census Programme 2005-2014, and the aim is to reduce that number further in the next ten-year programme that is being launched this year. Almost all countries in the world carry out a census of population and housing.