The blind spot in the 2021 World Bank estimate of the number of people without proof of legal identity, and the ‘Gen Z–Gen Alpha ratio’
In January 2023 the World Bank published a new estimate of the number of people in the world without proof of legal identity: 850 million. In the meantime, this estimate is going viral, as is the contention that, thus, there has been a reduction of 150 mn since the previous estimate of 2018. The importance of the estimation derives from ‘Sustainable Development Target 16.9’, a legal identity for all by 2030. The latest estimate of 850 mn for 2022 could thus be understood as the status halfway through the course of the ‘2030 agenda’ from 2015 through 2030. However, individual country data vary greatly in terms of their ‘data year’. As a result, the numbers do, rather, pertain in aggregate to a few years earlier, e.g., to 2019/2020. Hence the 150 mn change applies to the first third of the fifteen-year period of the 2030 agenda, and, as we write this, we are halfway the second third. From 2015 we have published a number of reviews of the work done on these estimates, predominantly by the World Bank, UNICEF and the United Nations Statistics Division. In our latest appraisal (dating from early 2022) we wondered whether the World Bank would do something to improve its estimate for the 5- to 17-year-old youth. It did not. Thus far for this cohort the bank has assumed that their possession of proof of identity is the same as that for the 0 to 4 years of age, for which UNICEF collects data. We had indicated that these data likely underestimate coverage for the 5 to 17 years of age. In this paper we show that to be the case. This makes a substantial difference for the World Bank’s 850 mn estimate, by as much as 150 to 250 mn. Importantly as well, it shines the light on secular improvement in birth registration that has largely remained ‘under the radar’. By and large the World Bank’s 2021 estimate covers the first third of ‘Gen Alpha’ born 2013–2017, and it assumes that the last ‘two-third’ of ‘Gen Z’, those aged 5 to 17 and born from 2000 through 2012, do have the same coverage as Gen Alpha children. This World Bank methodological short-cut (in the absence of data) presupposes a degree of secular improvement of birth registration coverage in the form of timely as well as late registration. We show on the basis of a sample of data for 25 countries that it still underestimates the existence of a more pronounced, and certainly surprising, improvement in coverage. In the process we show what data are already available to observe that trend, and which measures could be taken to collect and include more robust data at country level. We conclude that "There is a legion of reasons why knowing the legal identity status of children and youth in the age group of five to seventeen would be more than a ‘nice-to-have’. Having a more certain estimate of the overall global number of people without proof of legal identity a next time is but one of those many reasons."
Year of publication: |
2023
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Authors: | van der Straaten, Jaap |
Publisher: |
[S.l.] : SSRN |
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