Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística

About the publication - 2019

In order to meet the new proposals to release official statistics currently adopted by some countries, the IBGE introduces in this publication a single reference, of national scope, that allows to relate the statistics of the censuses and other surveys to the corresponding territorial divisions, either produced by the IBGE or by external sources, or even coming from the legislation. Two major groups of geographic divisions that reflect local and regional changes resulting from actions of the Brazilian society, economy and State that continuously redesign the huge National Territory are taken into account.

The first group, Legal divisions published by the IBGE, comprises administrative areas established by the legislation or normative rules for which the IBGE is committed to release statistical information. The delimitation is not made by the IBGE and, as a result, these divisions are updated only when the changes area formalized either by their producers or by new legal or administrative instruments. The second group, IBGE´s Institutional divisions, comprises areas established by the IBGE specifically for the production, dissemination and analysis of official statistics. These areas are designed to meet the requirements of data collection and operation of the censuses and other surveys, as well as the geographic studies key to those statistics, in order to produce a number of relevant divisions for the public planning and management, as well as inputs to the investments of the private sector.

Information on how each one of the territorial divisions now considered are produced, updated and managed, also including the following aspects, among others: updating cycle of the division; year in which the last update was made; number of component units; date of the next release; number of Municipalities included in the respective division; documents in which they are based, including legislation; conception; geocoding; and relation with other divisions.

This publication is the beginning of an ambitious institutional project aiming at integrating the existing systems and standardizing the incorporation of new territorial divisions currently present in Brazil, thus strengthening the integration between Statistics and Geography, aiming at releasing comparable and spatially integrated data.