Test for significance with data representing the whole population?

Is it even possible to use a statistical test in this case? Specifically, I'm analysing cities in two different regions. The aim is to determine if there is a statistically significant difference between the amount of cities that have UK names in each region.

The data look like this:

                 region1    region2
UK_named_cities  553        3255
total_cities     9155       55327


The percentages of cities with UK names:

region 1: 6.07%
region 2: 5.88%


The difference is 0.19%.

My first thought was an $χ2$ test, which yielded this result:

Test Statistic (X-squared): 0.2840672425979418
p-value: 0.5940477093071286
Degrees of Freedom: 1


I'm not sure this is right though. I don't have expected and observed counts as such. And a p-value of 0.59 doesn't seem that intuitive when there is a difference (albeit a very small one). I can't see how a t-test or z-test or reporting CI's would apply either.

Fundamentally, I'm confused. Can I only report that there is indeed a difference, but not test it for significance?

• – Silverfish Sep 18 '16 at 11:15