Abstract
Does anyone know the exact number of centenarians in Brazil? Since the nineteenth century,
the census has provided the number of 100-year-olds in one of the most populous countries
worldwide. In 1900, 4,438 individuals reported themselves to be centenarians, and 100 years
later, 24,576 centenarians were recorded in the census. Due to data quality issues, we are
skeptical about the real growth of the recorded population in the census. Therefore, we
produce new statistics of the centenarian population through the variable-r method combined
with different mortality models. We offer a set of estimates of the most likely number of
centenarians in Brazil over the period 1900-2000. There was virtually no centenarian at the
beginning of the twentieth century, and only in the 1990s, the centenarian population
surpassed 1,000 individuals. Our estimates confirm an extensive over-enumeration of
centenarians in census records since 1900. The good news is the improvement in census data
collection over time.
