About 300,000 more people live in Prague than according to official statistics, IPR claims
There are more people living in the capital city than the official population census indicates. According to an analysis by the Institute of Planning and Development (IPR), there are about 300,000 more instead of the official 1.3 million. The number of residents of the institute was determined based on anonymous data from mobile operators. During the day, hundreds of thousands more people will come to work, IPR director Ondřej Boháč told ČTK.
However, according to the Czech Statistical Office, this is a different census methodology, and according to its spokesman, Jan Cieslar, the office is not familiar with the way in which the IPR reached its conclusions.
“It turns out that around 1.6 million people live permanently in Prague, and if we include the residents of the Central Bohemian Region who commute to Prague every day for work, there are even 1.8 million people. However, only 1.3 million residents have permanent residence here,” said IPR director Ondřej Boháč.
According to Boháč, the increase in the number of inhabitants means higher financial demands on the city, which must provide, among other things, public transport, parking, apartments, doctors and kindergartens. “So even though infrastructure costs are logically increasing, Prague is still losing out on tax revenues,” added Boháč.
The available data show that despite the recent increase in the number of inhabitants of Prague, this was not always the case. Prague experienced a population decline in the 1990s, for example. On the contrary, the most dynamic growth of the population of Prague was in the years 2003 to 2009 and 2014 to 2019, i.e. during the period of strong economic growth.
“The purpose of the census is, among other things, to find out the real place where people live, where their household is. And that regardless of the address of permanent residence. In reality, it really happens that a person, for example, lives in a rented apartment in Prague because of his job, while his family home is more than 100 kilometers away,” said Cieslar.
However, since such a person regularly visits his family every weekend, he was counted during the census in a place where he has a household and family background. “These people, quite logically and in accordance with international methodology, do not appear in our data as residents of the capital. Unfortunately, we do not know what exact number the authors of the analysis arrived at based on the methodology, so we cannot comment on its conclusions,” added Cieslar.
According to the data CZSO approximately 1.28 million people lived in Prague as of December 31, 2021, which was 1.3 percent more. Last year, 15,993 people came. The increase was mostly caused by people moving to Prague. The average age of the inhabitants of Prague was the lowest in the country and amounted to 41.4 years, which is 1.3 years less than the national average. Among Prague residents, there were the most people with a university degree, and the largest number of foreigners also lived in the metropolis.