[SHiRO]

Originally Posted by New Brisavoine

Spain, Italy, Belgium, Germany, the Scandinavian countries all have population registers (other countries may have them too, but that's the ones I know). When you move into a municipality, you have to register yourself at the municipality in the population registers. If you don't, it makes life very difficult for you.

Netherlands too. But how does not registering make life difficult for you? Especially for temporary residents. A lot of students stay registered at their parent's home while actually living in the city in which they study for example. It just means that the mail from the municipality and the tax goes there and not to the place they actually live during the week.

In any case the 2011 censuses were not based on the population registers. They were based on an individual count of the population just like the decennial censuses in the US. Many European countries like Germany had stopped carrying out censuses, because they thought the population registers were enough to know the number of people living in a given place, but the EU mandated them to carry out a EU-wide 2011 census, and the census results showed that the population registers were quite flawed (in our mobile society, people don't necessarily tell the authorities when they move out of a place, so they are not crossed out from the registers, and can be counted in two different places). That's why after the census Germany, Italy, and Spain had to correct all the population registers.

To my knowledge there was no "census" in the Netherlands in 2011 or anytime in the recent past.