In ‘From province to nation: the demographic revolution of a people’ aspects of demographic change are reviewed to identify how problems of definition arise and how they might be interpreted by those with responsibilities of caring for and responding to the citizens of the new nation of East Timor.

The approach to an estimate of the number of true ethnic Timorese living in the province is to divide census and survey populations according to whether the head of the household was born in East Timor or not. The difficulties of producing demographic rates to describe the situation of East Timor can be overcome to some extent by referring to three measures of family structure: average number of children ever born to women; the average number of these children surviving to the time of the enumeration, and the calculation of the proportion surviving.

While fertility and mortality are the most important determinants in the growth of most national populations, the greater factor setting population numbers in East Timor will be migration.