By Xinhua,
Berlin : Germany has a “ghost” population of more than one million – people who are registered but simply don’t exist, Germany’s Federal Statistics Office said.
The Wiesdbaden-based office Tuesday said it believed Germany’s current population tally of 82.2 million was high by 1.3 million because many people had failed to de-register when moving to new homes.
They remained on the books as “card-index ghosts”.
According to German laws, everyone living in Germany, citizen or alien, has to register his name and address at a local government office, and de-register himself and his children when moving away.
For the upcoming 2011 European Union census, Germany plans to calculate its population using estimates from registers, welfare records, mail-carrier records and a detailed survey of a small sample of the population.