The government's plan to combat the downgrading of the French economy

The first stage of the productive pact has just ended. For six months, the Minister of the Economy and Finance Bruno Le Maire has conducted a dialogue with stakeholders in the French productive system to achieve full employment by 2025. Among the participants, actors chambers of commerce and industry, chambers of trades and crafts, the permanent assembly of the chamber of agriculture, local communities as well as trade unions and employers.

All meet this Tuesday to present the main lines of the Productive Pact. A new phase of consultation, including this time the citizens, should then begin for a period of six months. However, Édouard Philippe and Emmanuel Macron will be the only ones to decide on the possible measures to take. No decision should be made before the 2021 Finance Bill.

Risk of "productive decommissioning"

So what to retain from this first phase of restitution? First, Bruno Le Maire believes that France faces a risk of "productive decommissioning". "We are losing our quality of productive nation, in the industrial as in the agricultural sector, by default of innovation, positioning, skills," he said.

The restitution document thus recalls that the French industry, whose share in the national wealth has increased from 16.7% to 11.9% between 2000 and 2018, "represents a smaller share of our GDP than our neighbors". "Our production, when we look only at industrial production, is based on three major sectors, which are wines and spirits, luxury and aeronautics", detailed Bruno Le Maire. However, "we do not make a large production and a great economic nation solely on the basis of three sectors," he insisted.

The "degradation of our foreign trade is also the symptom of a weakening of the French economy", still points the document of restitution which also evokes the slowing down of productivity that Bruno Le Maire explains in part by the number of hours worked which "has fallen in France much faster than in the main advanced countries". "We do not work enough," said the Minister of the Economy. An observation that remains to relativize.

And the tenant of Bercy add: "The French have a feeling of downgrading, the middle class disappears, they live less well than their parents, it's true.There is a national impoverishment is a reality ", he commented.

Digitization and ecological transition

The document of restitution advance several tracks to relaunch the productive apparatus. In particular, it calls for strengthening France's "innovation capacity", which already has "world-class engineers and high-quality public research" and to continue to develop start-up financing. The stakeholders consulted also regret that the big companies in France are poorly represented among the fifteen largest investors in R & D (only Dassault Systems is included).

Among the other orientations retained: the acceleration of the digitization of French society. "In 2019, France was only 15th out of 28 in the ranking of the European Commission on the economy and digital society," reads. The energy and ecological transition represents another essential challenge that requires "profoundly transforming our production and consumption model". Because if "the French economy is already one of the most efficient on the environmental level", according to the authorities consulted, the carbon footprint of the Hexagon "has increased by 11%" in 25 years.

Moreover, "there is no coherence to favor green finance, to reduce CO2 emissions within our borders if it is for the Treasury to provide guarantees for tens of billions of dollars. euros to export projects that increase carbon footprint abroad, "said the minister.

Towards a decrease in production taxes?

The productive pact must also make it possible to adapt the training "to the new professions to aim at full employment", says the document of restitution, affirming that "35% of the French exercise a trade for which they do not have an adequate qualification". This explains why France has "150,000 unfilled jobs while there are three million people looking for jobs".

Finally, production taxes also seem to be in the sights of Bruno Le Maire to revive the competitiveness of businesses. "Today we have production taxes, which penalize companies, which are seven times higher than in Germany and twice as high as the average of the countries of the euro zone," he said. However, he wishes to proceed cautiously on this issue with the local authorities, whose resources depend largely on this fiscal manna.