The French Regional Database

The French Regional Database is a project whose main objectives are to provide historical demographic and economic data about French regions and to improve general knowledge of the French regional characteristics, through their analysis over time.

This project is based on the digitization of archives available in the French statistical institutes (Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques, Institut National d'Etudes Démographiques, Ministry of Economy and Finance), relating among other things to population movement (births according to the age of the mother, deaths by age and sex, deaths by cause), censuses (population by age and sex), income tax returns (income tax tabulations) or inheritance declarations.

Both digitization of original raw data and use of rigorous methodological protocols enable the creation of a set of demographic and economic databases. This set will initially cover mortality by age (French Human Mortality Database), fertility (French Human Fertility Database) and population by age at the local level since the beginning of the 20th century, as well as spatial disparities of income (French Income Database) and wealth (French Wealth Database).

To be as close as possible to the expectations of potential users, the final data are available for 3 different geographical levels, consistent with the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) used by Eurostat: departments (NUTS 3, 97 units), former regions (NUTS 2, 22 units) and current regions (NUTS 1, 13 units).

Our classification considers Corsica as a single department. It includes the former departments of Seine and Seine-et-Oise, which were remodelled in the 1960’s. One methodological document specific to each database explains the availability of data for each geographical unit.