What is EDP ?

The Permanent Demographic Sample (Echantillon Démographique Permanent - EDP) was formed in the 1960's by the Insee to respond to a need of studying individuals' professional, residential and familial paths, who are living in Metropolitan France (since 2003, overseas departments are included too). 

It consists in a compilation of information from two main sources : civil status data (births, marriages, deaths) and census forms (exhaustive before 2004, as annual survey after). 

These individuals are selected from their date of birth, that is the people born from the 1st to the 4th of october. These are automatically included in the EDP once an information is found in one of the databases. Since 2004 for the civil status data and 2008 for the census, people born from the 2nd to the 5th of January, the 1st to the 4th April and the 1st to the 4th July are part of the sample too, which allow to multiply by 4 its size. 

Some of this information are deficient because of data collect gaps applying to specific periods (1982-1997), as well as an underestimation of events occured abroad. 

Successive enrichment projects of the EDP arised since the 2000's. The project "EDP+" first consists in reviewing the structure of the sample in a new production environment, the "directory of natural persons" (base de répertoire des personnes physiques - BRPP) handled by the Insee, which identifies individuals likely to be a part of EDP from their first name, last name, date and place of birth. The first enrichment made it easy to couple different data sources (with an unique ID for each individual) and permit a second improvment of the EDP with the "EDP++" project. Henceforth, information on employees (since 1967) and fiscal data (since 2011) are available. 

For more information :  Jugnot, Stéphane, 2014. "La constitution de l’échantillon démographique permanent de 1968 à 2012", Document de travail n°F1406, Insee.