The surprising results of the Saudi Arabian 2004 demographic census

At first glance, in contrast to political documents, official demographic data, particularly total population figures, "look innocent." The common tendency is to accept them "as is" because governments tend not to manipulate the declared number of their citizens. In most cases this assumption is true. Is it also true for Saudi Arabia? In the 1970s and 1990s, Saudi authorities published the results of two demographic censuses that numbered the Saudi citizenry at 6,218,361 in September 1974 and 12,310,053 in September 1992. However, many experts found these figures to be highly inflated, as shown in the table.