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Bosnia and Herzegovina counted · Part 09 of 09

The fine print

Where every number in the series comes from, how the tables were joined to the map, and what was left out because no office publishes it in a form that can be checked.

The answer

Every figure comes from a table its publisher put out: the state agency’s final census results, the RS office’s own results and estimates, the election commission’s voter counts, and the UN’s and Eurostat’s migration statistics. Nothing was estimated, modelled or filled in here. One table exists only as a scan and was read by OCR, then proofread and checked against its own total; the PDF-only bulletins are left out.

Primary sources only

Where the numbers come from

  • Agency for Statistics of BiH, census 2013 final results (June 2016)

    Books 1, 2, 3 and 8 as XLSX: age and sex by municipality and settlement (1: 3.1, 3.1.1), ethnicity and religion by municipality and settlement (2: 2.1, 2.2, 5.1), households and members abroad (3: 1.1, 3.1), residence in 1991 and displacement (8: 6.1, 7.1). 3,531,159 residents in 141 municipalities and Brčko District, 6,141 settlements.

  • Statistics Institute of the Republika Srpska, census results 2013

    Its own results for the RS, by city and municipality, in Cyrillic: tables 2 (age and sex) and 4 (ethnicity). 1,170,342 residents.

  • Statistics Institute of the RS, population estimates 2013–2025

    Mid-year estimates by city and municipality, table 4. Stanari, split from Doboj in 2014, is listed apart and summed with Doboj here; the City of Istočno Sarajevo is listed beside its six municipalities and skipped, so nobody is counted twice.

  • International Monitoring Operation, final report

    The people enumerated before the residence rules, by entity (table 4), the share of records that could not be sorted, and the over-count estimate from the post-enumeration survey.

  • 1991 census, final results by municipality

    Published by the Zavod za statistiku RBiH and hosted by the Federation’s statistics office. Used only for the national total, 4,377,033.

  • Central Election Commission of BiH, results of the 2022 and 2026 general elections

    Registered in-country voters per municipality, from the files of the election series.

  • Central Election Commission of BiH, voters registered to vote outside BiH, 2022

    A scanned five-page table, per basic electoral unit; Mostar’s six city areas are summed into Grad Mostar. 69,966 voters.

  • UN DESA, International Migrant Stock 2024

    People born in BiH living in each country, 1990–2024, from the destination countries’ censuses and registers.

  • Eurostat, population and residence permits

    BiH citizens (migr_pop1ctz) and people born in BiH (migr_pop3ctb) in each EU and EFTA country on 1 January, the newest year each reports since 2015, and first residence permits to BiH citizens by year and reason (migr_resfirst).

  • US Census Bureau, American Community Survey

    Table B05006, people born in BiH living in the US: one-year estimates for every year since 2010 (none for 2020), and the newest five-year estimates by state and metro area, each with its 90% margin of error. The UN file has no BiH-born figure for the US, which reports its migrants to the UN by region.

  • Agency for Statistics of BiH, census 2013, Book 8 table 9.1

    Residents who had lived abroad for a year or more, by country, reason and municipality.

  • geoBoundaries, BiH municipalities (ADM3, 2013), CC BY 4.0

    The map, shared with the election series; areas are measured on its simplified outlines.

How the tables were joined

Method

The state agency’s spreadsheets carry no codes, only names in capitals, with a level for each row: country, entity, canton, municipality, settlement. A script reads every table, gives each row its municipality from the rows above it, and matches the municipality to the election commission’s code by name, with a short list of exceptions written out by hand: the two Novi Grads, the four municipalities the entity line split in two (Foča, Kupres, Pale, Trnovo), Prozor-Rama, Mostar and Brčko. Every one of the 142 units matches, and the municipal figures add up to the national total exactly.

Settlements are kept by their place in the table, not their name: 763 settlement names occur more than once in the country, and three repeat inside a single municipality, all of them in Konjic. The age table and the ethnicity table list them in the same order, and the script checks name, municipality and population row by row.

Stanari was cut from Doboj in 2014, after the census, so the census figures for Doboj include it, and the map draws the two as one. Brčko District is one census unit and one shape, though voters there choose either entity’s ballot.

The election commission’s table of voters registered abroad has no text layer. Each page was rendered and read with the OCR engine built into Windows, and every row rebuilt from where its code, name and count sit on the page. The engine skips or misreads some short counts, a lone 1 or 0 mostly, so every page was proofread against the scan: eleven of 145 counts are corrected by hand, each listed in the script. The rows then add up to the decision’s own total, 69,966, exactly.

The RS office’s tables are in Cyrillic; names are transliterated and matched the same way, inside the RS only. Its municipal totals add up to its published 1,170,342, and its estimates to its published entity totals for every year.

And why

What the series leaves out

  • 1991, municipality by municipality

    The 109 pre-war municipalities do not map onto today’s 142, no office publishes a table that says how, and the 1991 figures by settlement exist only as scanned pages. The 1991 census also counted people working abroad as residents, which 2013 did not.

  • Federation and Brčko estimates since 2013

    The Federation office publishes municipal estimates, births, deaths and migration only inside PDF bulletins; Brčko’s estimates leave out migration abroad. Mixing them with the RS spreadsheet would compare unlike figures.

  • A single number for the diaspora

    The UN and the US Census Bureau count birthplace, Eurostat citizenship or birthplace in some countries only, the election commission those who registered to vote, the census the households with someone left to answer. Each misses people the others count, so they are never added together.

  • Settlement boundaries

    No office publishes settlement outlines that can be downloaded, so settlements appear in tables and lists, never on a map.

JSON, as read from the source spreadsheets

Download the data

The files the series is built from, each with the URLs of the spreadsheets it was read from, keyed by the election commission’s municipality codes. The scripts are fetch-bih-census.mjs, fetch-bih-diaspora.mjs, ocr-cik-abroad.py and derive-bih-census.mjs, under scripts/notes in this site’s repository.

  • 2013.jsonevery municipality: age by sex, ethnicity, religion, households, residence in 1991, displacement
  • 2013-settlements.jsonevery settlement: age groups, average age, the three largest groups
  • rs.jsonthe RS office’s 2013 results and its 2013–2025 estimates
  • diaspora.jsonUN migrant stock, Eurostat citizens, birthplace and permits, the US Census Bureau’s estimates, and census table 9.1 by municipality
  • voters-abroad-2022.jsonvoters registered to vote from abroad, per municipality, 2022