Denominator Adjusted PGE Fertility and Mortality Rates for Pakistan and Bangladesh: 1962 – 65

The Population Growth Estimation (PGE) experiment of Pakistan, launched in 1961 to collect data on births and deaths through a sampling approach, yielded estimates of vital rates for the years 1962 through 1965. The statistics obtained through the PGE for each of the former two wings of the country namely West Pakistan (now Pakistan) and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) were included in the two reports on PGE which also provided a description of the project design and some of the results [4, 5]. The overall aim of the PGE was to arrive at reliable estimates of birth and death rates through improved coverage by the simultaneous use of Longitudinal Registration (LR) and retrospective Cross-sectional Survey (CS), which were each independently carried out in the same sample areas. The purpose behind using the two systems was that either the registration or the survey when used alone would miss some events of births and deaths which had actually occurred, whereas under the dual system if one system failed to cover some events, the other was likely to pick these up and vice versa.