Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, made a provocative claim in recent days, though one that conceals justifiable alarm about the situation in member states. In the view of Eurostat, in fact, no one is able at the present time to declare with any precision the number of people who inhabit the European Union. The statement seems all the more disconcerting if we consider that – in the aftermath of the “mad cow” crisis and the tight controls that followed from it the statistical services of the Commission have at their disposal exact figures about the number of cattle present in the territory of the EU. In recent decades, in fact, the national and EU authorities have especially concentrated their efforts on improving the statistical indicators in the environmental sector, and in the sector of innovation and new technologies, while neglecting the demographic indicators. The opening of the internal frontiers and the growth in the number of immigrants make it all the more necessary for member states to undertake a census of the over 342 million European citizens.
