Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística

Description

The civil registry is the first document that formalizes, for the State and society, the existence of a new natural person and, for this reason, it works as a formal identity of the citizen, representing, therefore, a first step for completely exercising the citizenship in Brazil. In addition, that document is also a requirement not only for obtaining others, yet also to guarantee the access to basic social services, receive the first vaccines and enroll in school. Therefore, it is key under the point of view of the human rights.

It should be highlighted that birth registry is guaranteed by the Law of Public Registries (Law no. 6,015, of December 31, 1973) and, according to Article 50, it should be made in registry offices up to 15 days after the baby´s birth, a deadline that can be extended for up to three months for the locations far more than 30 km of the registry office. As it is difficult to attest the distance from the baby´s house to the registry office, the IBGE considers since 2003 that the births of a given year include the registries made up to the third month of the year that followed that of the birth. As a consequence, late registries are those births registered as of the fourth month of the year that followed that of the birth. The difference between the births registered by the Vital Statistics survey and the births forecast in the Population Projection by Sex and Age, both of them carried out by the IBGE, generates the percentage of under-reporting of births, i.e., the percentage of births expected for a given year that was not registered in the registry office up to the first quarter of the following year.

In this document, the IBGE presents a brief script to access information on under-reporting of births from four different data sources:

• Results of the 2010 Population Census, taking into account persons up to 10 years of age with birth registry;
• Mapping provided by the Digital Atlas of Brazil 1 by 1 that uses the Method of Statistical Grids, in which the results of the Population Census are aggregated into regular cells of 1 km by 1 km or smaller, allowing to pinpoint areas of the selected municipality with the highest percentage of persons up to 10 years of age without birth registry, as well as with a percentage of households with per capita nominal monthly household earnings below 1/2 minimum wages, a major target of the policies against under-reporting of births;
• Results of the Survey of Basic Municipal Information - Munic, which allow to pinpoint the existence or not of an infrastructure in the municipal administration to implement and follow up policies of eradication of such occurrence; and
• Results of the Vital Statistics, which allow to know, on an annual basis, the amount of birth registries, by place of the mother´s house, pinpointing those occurred in years before their registrations.