The CHilean Internal Migration (CHIM) database: temporally consistent spatial data for the analysis of human mobility

Abstract

Changes in zonal boundaries and coding schemes severely compromise temporal comparison of data. In Chile, the Population and Housing census is the only comprehensive source of internal migration data, but municipal boundaries and occupation and industry sector coding schemes have undergone various changes which hamper the temporal comparability of census data. This paper presents the CHilean Internal Migration database developed by Rowe and Bell (2013) which provides a temporally consistent framework for the analysis of internal migration over a period covering twenty-five years from 1977 to 2002. Specifically, it offers a hierarchical system of 304 municipalities, 51 provinces and 13 regions, and 10 occupational groups and 11 industrial sectors which are temporally consistent over the 1977-82, 1987-92 and 1997-2002 census intervals. The database can be downloaded from: https://s3.amazonaws.com/geoda/data/CHIM.zip.