Defining Areas: Linking Geographic Data in New Zealand

This paper develops a match quality statistic to quantify the trade-off between ‘specificity’ and ‘completeness’ when aggregating one regional aggregation to another. We apply this statistic to calculate the degree of mismatch between various regional aggregations for New Zealand using 1991 and 2001 Census Data.

A program to calculate mismatch statistics is included as an appendix, as a Stata® ado file.