Current developments in access to administrative data for research

Mobilizing the resources of administrative data for official statistics, evidence-based policies. and research is at the top of the agenda. In countries where official statistics are largely based on registers with a national statistical institute in a central position, access to these data has been facilitated earlier than in countries more reliant on surveys for official statistics, eventually decentralized in ministries' statistical departments, regions, or federal systems. This paper focuses on the French case, a country where administrative data are held by various government bodies under different legal frameworks. Building on previous developments regarding confidential microdata and the implementation of the Secure Remote Access Centre (CASD), changes in the legal frameworks have opened access for researchers to a large bunch of administrative data. Following changes for tax data (2014) and medico-administrative data (2015), the Digital law (2017) is an interesting attempt to provide a general framework dealing with the obstacle of various implementations of "the professional secrecy". The same law allows merging these data using the national identifier both for the official statistics and the research needs. However, a number of challenges arise: harmonization of procedures and requirements; centralized vs decentralized organisation for secure access facilities; metadata; preservation issues