Quatre Observations sur la mobilité résidentielle en France métropolitaine

1- 10% of the inhabitants of France move every year.2- Residential mobility has increased during the last thirty years, but with slowing downsand even recesses when the economic conditions were low.3- An important part of the population stays in the same region during their active life ;another noticeable part performs several migrations.4- When a residential migration is followed by another, in about half of the cases thesecond one is a return to the region left during the first one ; this proportion hasdecreased recently.5- These observations are established from six groups of statistical data : labor forcesurveys, censuses, housing surveys, “panel européen”, four retrospective surveys, andthe panel extracted from the annual declarations of social data “DADS”.6- The censuses provide geographical detail about migration flows ; but one has to takeinto account their retrospective observation spell, which is longer than five years, andfor that purpose to make use of a “migrant-migration” model whose hypotheses cannotbe applied to all sub-populations.7- Notwithstanding his limited field and his defects, mainly present in ancient years, the“panel DADS” is a reliable and rich source of information to study internal migration.