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A widespread presence throughout central-government administrative bodies

Public-sector statisticians are present in nearly all government ministries, in many public agencies, and even in private-sector entities performing public-service missions.

Among these organizations, INSEE and the other "ministerial statistical offices" (services statistiques ministériels: SSMs) form the "public statistical service" (law n° 51-711 of 7 June 1951, article 1). They apply their competencies to a very wide range of areas, from sports to foreign trade.

To carry out its missions, the public statistical service (INSEE + ministries) employs 7,300 people, of whom 5,300 at INSEE.

Because of the existence of the SSMs, the statistical system is said to be "functionally decentralized."

The presence of statistical facilities in French regions-particularly at INSEE-also attests to a genuine geographic deconcentration.

INSEE

INSEE, a Directorate-General of the Ministry of the Economy, Industry and Employment, is a public administrative entity (administration publique).

The missions entrusted to INSEE give it a special status within the Ministry. The Ministry's other Directorates exercise action-related or supervisory responsibilities; they are the instruments for designing and implementing government policy. By contrast, INSEE operates in the sphere of information and analysis, serving private-sector economic agents as well as public authorities. In other words, it is an essentially technical organization.

INSEE missions range beyond the Institute's in-house operations-i.e., its own production-and also encompass the economic and social information apparatus implemented or funded by the government, which the Institute manages and coordinates.

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Ministerial statistical offices

Whatever the scope of their missions, all ministerial statistical offices exercise at least four responsibilities:

  • They are in charge of implementing the 1951 Act on legal obligation, coordination, and confidentiality in the field of statistics. Since 1986, the law offers them broad access to administrative sources for statistical processing purposes.
  • They apply European Community rules and maintain ongoing relations with Eurostat (Statistical Office of the European Communities).
  • They liaise between their ministries and INSEE for all statistical issues that fall within the sphere of competency of their respective ministries (surveys, publication of results, exchange of information) and for managing their INSEE-trained professional statisticians. The latter represent a major share of total senior personnel and about one-fourth of total staff.
  • They disseminate and comment on the information in their possession. This long-standing practice, which has become a rule, ensures wide access to economic and social information by citizens and specialist categories (professionals, research organizations, journalists, scholars, teachers, and students). This also allows a strict enforcement of statistical confidentiality in publications and dissemination programs.

On the other hand, there are a wide variety of tasks carried out among the different statistics offices; this variety derives not only from the different areas of interest, but also as a result of the varied history of each office. There are eight activities - data collection, participation in management, study capacity, computer science, evaluation, participation in forecasting, assistance with decision-making, and guidance in research - which differentiate them considerably. Depending on the office, these activities may be either non-existent or have a considerable role to play while being closely linked with daily operations.

There is the same variety in the size and organisation of the different offices. "Agriculture" is the largest, with almost 500 employees. Four more large ministerial statistics offices have devolved to the regions and have a large number of staff (from about 250 to 400): these are "Education", "Sustainable Development", "Health and Solidarities" and "Labour-Employment-Training".

The "Custom" and "Justice" offices are of intermediate size (from 80 to 250). The other statistics offices (Culture; Defence; Civil service; Local government; Fisheries and Aquaculture; Youth affairs and Sports; Immigration; Higher Education and Research) have only a small staff (8 to 30).

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Task-sharing in the official statistical system

The division of labour between units of the official statistical system is largely determined by history. The classification below is highly simplified and describes only part of the actual task-sharing between INSEE and ministerial statistical offices.

Production system

In the field of business statistics, INSEE manages registers and coordinates surveys (concepts, questionnaires, methods, etc.). It defines the economic activities of enterprises and coordinates the survey launch files. INSEE tracks producer prices in all industries.

Ministerial statistical offices track the units and markets in their respective spheres of competence. The offices conduct the annual enterprise surveys (enquêtes annuelles d'entreprise: EAEs or European structural surveys) that collect the operating accounts of enterprises (20 or more employees in the goods-producing industries). They are organized around a common core (questionnaire and processing operations) and constitute the Eurostat structural surveys in France.

Ministerial statistical offices carry out the production surveys in individual industries (enquêtes de branches: EBs) that feed the European database on markets for manufactured products (PRODCOM) and the specialized surveys in the offices' respective industries. INSEE itself conducts the statistical surveys on the tertiary sector (excluding transportation), as the ministerial statistical offices with responsibility in these areas do not gather data. In the Customs Service, the "statistics and economic studies" department provides trade data to complement market data.

These sources are used side by side with a variety of specialized tools concerning, for example, farmers and farming concerns, transportation vehicles and their uses, financial structures, and energy consumption. These tools are generally administered by the ministerial statistical office in the relevant field.

Business surveys are often conducted by mail, a method that has fostered their growing use by ministerial statistical offices. The surveys are now starting to be conducted online.

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Demographic and social statistics

INSEE performs censuses and surveys of households. For example, it conducts the "employment" survey, the French version of the European labour-force survey. It collects information on consumer prices and prepares the consumer price index. Household surveys are usually carried out by INSEE, which operates a permanent network of interviewers. Lastly, INSEE extracts data from tax and social-contribution files.

The ministerial statistical offices, instead, are in charge of compiling statistics on individuals, public-sector units, and private-sector units that fall within the spheres of competence of their respective ministries. Tasks are distributed by administrative area.

DARES (labour and employment) tracks wages, working conditions, the unemployed, and subsidized jobs. DREES (healthcare and social protection) produces statistics on hospitals, healthcare workers, and the population's health status. The Justice Ministry office collects information on court activity, delinquents, inmates, and penal institutions.

The Civil-Service Ministry office monitors public-sector employment.

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Economic analysis

INSEE is in charge of the national accounts, the analysis of current economic conditions, and short-term forecasting. While the Institute is responsible for short-term analysis, it collects only certain categories of current economic data on its own: price data, business and household confidence surveys, and the labour-force survey.

INSEE also processes administrative data from tax forms on business sales and data on social-contribution receipts.

By contrast, data on industrial production, jobs, unemployment, and wages, for example, are collected and published by ministerial statistical offices. Typically, however, INSEE computes the related indices, harmonizes sources, and performs benchmarking and seasonal adjustment.

For medium- and long-term analysis, INSEE has most of the required instruments at its disposal through the processing of administrative sources, many of which-such as personal and corporate income tax returns-have an annual periodicity.

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Ministerial statistical offices (SSM)

The National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies and the ministerial statistical services form the "public statistical service" (law n° 51-711 of 7 June 1951 on legal obligation, coordination and confidentiality in the field of statistics, article 1).
The ministerial statistical services are listed in annex of decree n° 2009-250 of 3 March 2009 concerning the Public Statistics Authority. The decree has beeen updated by order of 16 December 2011.

Ministerial statistical offices