INSEE Portail API Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques

History and Background

The Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE) is France's national statistics bureau, created by the Budget Law of April 27, 1946, as successor to the National Statistics Service (SNS). INSEE took over a continuous tradition of statistical work in France dating to 1833. It is headquartered in Montrouge, a southern suburb of Paris, and serves as France's representative to Eurostat. Since 1989, INSEE has functioned as a statistical authority with scientific, organizational, and financial autonomy.

The API Catalogue and BDM

INSEE's API catalogue, accessible at portail-api.insee.fr, provides developers and researchers with programmatic access to France's official statistical series through a suite of REST APIs. The most significant is the Banque de Données Macro-économiques (BDM) API, which provides access to hundreds of thematic groupings of time series published on the INSEE website. The BDM, launched in 1984, originally contained 70,000 time series; it now encompasses hundreds of thousands of series and was modernized in 2015 with a fully open web service based on the ISO SDMX standard.

Collections and Data Series

Through the API catalogue, users can access time series covering national accounts, price indices, employment and labor market data, household income, international trade, demographic statistics, and much more. Series can be queried by unique identifier (idBank) or thematically. The APIs return data in standard SDMX and JSON formats, enabling machine-to-machine data integration.

Access and Usage

The INSEE API catalogue is freely accessible. API documentation, developer guides, and sample queries are available through the portal. INSEE data is distributed under an open license (compatible with Creative Commons Attribution), allowing free reuse including for commercial purposes with source attribution.