In her editorial for this Friday, January 21, Agnès Verdier-Molinié, director of the IFRAP foundation, discusses the public deficit and inflation.
It’s around 7% instead of 8.2%, it looks a bit like the avalanche of good news, but the surprise is largely overplayed.
The government had chosen not to take into account in the 2021 amending budget all of the growth estimated for months at around 6.7%, which made it possible to borrow more on the markets, to postpone billions of euros not used in 2022 and to show a reduction in the public deficit.
Is the public deficit lower than expected?
Officially yes, but at Bercy, they have known for a long time that the 2021 public deficit is not at 8.2% of GDP and that we were expecting good news because of the undervalued growth effect.
In addition, it is possible that we will have a revision of inflation for 2021 and that GDP will be higher than expected with a further downward revision of the deficit as a percentage of GDP.