Istat demographics

By Gianluca Campanella (gianluca@campanella.org)

The Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat) collates demographic data from register offices, and makes them available through its demographics portal.

This repository contains a set of scripts to scrape and aggregate monthly time series of births, deaths, and net migration at municipality (comune) level, separately for men and women.

The data are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence, like the original data.

Usage

1. Run the Scrapy script scrape.py:

   scrapy runspider -o istat-demographics-scraped.csv -t csv scrape.py

2. Run the R script postprocess.R:

   R --vanilla < postprocess.R

   This will produce the output file istat-demographics.csv.gz
3. Optionally, delete the file istat-demographics-scraped.csv

Data dictionary

The file istat-demographics.csv.gz contains the following variables:

Name	Content
group	NUTS 1 (group of regions) identifier
region	NUTS 2 (region) identifier
province	NUTS 3 / LAU 1 (province) identifier
municipality	LAU 2 (municipality) identifier
year	Year
month	Month (1 = January, 12 = December)
sex	Sex (M = Male, F = Female)
births	Births
deaths	Deaths
net_migration	Net migration

Note: LAU identifiers are updated periodically; see this page (in Italian) for more details.