Austria Regional Socio-economic Variables
History of Data
The Austrian data for the Austro-Hungarian Empire cover 17 provinces. All but Dalmatia are contiguous. Paul Demeny, in his work on Austria-Hungary for the European Fertility study, felt that these 17 provinces were too gross as categories for analysis. He organized data for 277 smaller districts. The districts, taken from the census, are administrative districts, identified with a political unit such as a village or city. Some of the districts are composed of smaller units, which are shown in the list of districts, but for which data were not compiled separately.
There are 100 variables arranged by district, with one record for each of the 277 districts. A 12-character district label is followed by 100 8-digit variables. The placement of the decimal point is indicated in the codebook. Some errors were found and corrected in the documentation for decimal placement, so caution is warranted. The data refer to the period from 1880-1910 and include statistics for population, births, marriage, fertility, deaths, infant mortality and legitimacy. Socioeconomic variables include some statistics on literacy, language group, dependency on agriculture, and economic status of women. Some variables are not well-described as to date.
Availability of Data and Documentation
The data and codebook, as well as these notes and the list of districts and subdistricts, are available.
You can click here for a file list.
The codebook may be viewed online by clicking here.
Key References
- Demeny, Paul. "Early Fertility Decline in Austria-Hungary: a Lesson in Demographic Transition." In Population and Social Change, D.V. Glass and R. Revelle (eds.) New York, Crane, Russak and Co., Inc., 1972.
- Forrest, Jaqueline D. Fertility Decline in Austria, 1880-1910. Doctoral Dissertation, Princeton University, 1975.
