Even before Covid-19 struck, Brazil’s census was in trouble. In 2019, the administration of President Jair Bolsonaro announced that the number of survey questions in the decennial population count, set for 2020, would be reduced due to budgetary restraints. Amid the first wave of Covid-19 outbreaks in March 2020, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) said that the census would be postponed to 2021. In April, the Brazilian government canceled it, due to heavy national spending cuts due to the country’s decade-long economic crisis exacerbated by the pandemic.

Now the census is set to proceed in 2022, after a state government sued and the Supreme Court ruled in May that the government would need to find the funds necessary to carry it out.

The story is similar in other Latin American countries.

Full article at Bloomberg CityLab’s website. Date of publication: 21/07/2021.