Idescat.cat is the website of the Statistical Institute of Catalonia (Idescat), the statistical body of the government of Catalonia.
This website offers a wide range of official statistics on Catalonia generated by both Idescat and different bodies within the Statistical System of Catalonia, which is then supplemented by data from other public agents and institutions. This website also provides information on opinion surveys.
There are millions of statistical facts on this website. In the field of demographics, you can obtain data on the population such as the number of inhabitants, structure of the population by age and sex, births, deaths, migrations, commutes for studying or working, educational level, households and families and the linguistic census. In the field of economics, information is available on the main economic activity sectors, on macro-magnitudes such as the GDP and income, on commercial transactions and on various short-term statistical indicators, such as prices, salaries, unemployment, the employed population, industrial production, services, transports and so forth. In the social realm, statistics are available on education, culture, sports, the environment, health care, justice, household consumption, uses of time as well as on social indicators and quality of life indicators.
All this information can be found for Catalonia as a whole, and a great deal is geographically disaggregated by counties, municipalities and even by inframunicipal units.
This information can be accessed by the main page in three different ways: by thematic areas, by the site map and by the internal search engine.
If you only seek the most basic and general data on Catalonia, your best bet is to download the informative sheet Figures on Catalonia which is accessible via catalogue of publications.
Another easy-to-use publication that provides information on a county-wide scale is the Statistical Yearbook of Catalonia, which is divided into thematic chapters and is available in both PDF and spreadsheet formats.
If you are interested in the main data on a particular municipality or county, we suggest you examine the municipal files and county files, which you can access by clicking on the Territory button.
This is the most common way of examining the information available on this website since it provides access to pages that contain all the information related to the thematic area chosen. Place the icon on one of the buttons and a menu with different options will appear. By clicking on it, you will go to a new page that displays all the links available on this website related to each theme.
In general, these pages present the information organised into two columns. In the first, or left hand, column, you will find a compilation of synthetic or aggregated information on each topic. We recommend that you use these pages when you do not need highly detailed information on the thematic or geographical area.
On the right hand column, however, you will find expanded information, which delves into more detail about the contents of the previous column. This section contains three possible types of information: monographic information, which enables you to enter a specific database on the topic chosen; territorial information, which enables you to access a database for the geographical area chosen; and related topics, which contains external links to similar information.
If you place the icon on the Territory button you will access the available data for a given geographical area. At this same button you can obtain a pre-selection of basic information for each municipality (municipal files) and county (county files) in Catalonia. As well as a database on Territorial codes, among other options.
This section provides institutional information on Idescat and explains the main services it provides
This is an alternative to the topic-based searches mentioned above. You will find the map button at the top of all the pages on our website.
Finally, there is yet another very powerful tool for finding information. It is a search engine (box on upper right corner of the screen) which enables you to perform a simultaneous search through the entire website. When you use it, a new screen appears where the results are shown as well as the possibilities for advanced searches and a help menu.
Example of a search:
You want to find projections for the active population for the year 2015. You type into the search engine: active population 2015. The result obtained will provide information available on the website related to these topics.
At the heading of a table next to the title blue icons may appear that enable you to access further information, methodology or graphs or to change the time period.
When you have accessed a database, above the title bar there might be tools that enable you to change the parameters of the information being displayed, as well as download the information into a spreadsheet.
Once you have got the table of statistical information, some data bases on the website enable you to display graphic functions that supplement the data requested.
The Institute also provides an inquiry request service aimed at all the media as well as citizens in general for cases in which the information needed cannot be found on the website or in which a non-standard combination of variables is requested.
In these cases, using the button contact located at the top of all the pages you can access an custom orders helpdesk.
