French Regional Income Database

The French Regional Income Database was created to provide detailed data to anyone interested in the history of regional development in France. This project is the result of a collaboration between Florian Bonnet, Hippolyte d'Albis and Aurélie Sotura (researcher at the Banque de France).

The French Regional Income Database will consist of two types of income data.

  • Departmental income distributions: these were calculated using departmental tax tabulations for the years 1960-1969, 1986-1998, and 2001-2015 and population estimates by age for the same period. Computations of income distributions follow a methodological protocol inspired by the methodological protocol used by researchers at the World Inequality Database. This methodological protocol is freely available in a Banque de France working paper co-authored by Florian Bonnet and Aurélie Sotura, and available here. The data will be freely available on this website as soon as this article is published in an academic journal.

  • Total incomes: departmental incomes for the years 1922 to 2015 were calculated using tax tabulations for the available years, aggregate income tax data for the other years, and age-specific populations for the entire period. The methodological protocol used to estimate these data was published in the review Economie et Statistiques. We thank users of these data for citing this article as a reference for this work. The estimates will be updated annually to take into account the most recent data.

For each geographic unit, we make available in a single file the following variables: taxable income of imposable tax units (ITU_Inc, in current francs until 1999, in current euros thereafter), number of imposable tax units (ITU_n), tax paid by imposable tax units (ITU_tax, in current francs until 1999, in current euros thereafter) population by age group (P_x), estimated total fiscal income (Inc_tot, 2015 constant euros), estimated fiscal income per adult (Inc_pa, 2015 constant euros), estimated relative fiscal income per adult (Inc_pa_rel), inflation indicator for moving from current to constant values (Deflator).