Lhe finance bill for 2023 contains more than 67 billion euros in expenditure “harmful for the climate and biodiversity”, according to the Climate Action Network (RAC), a federation of twenty-seven associations involved in the fight against climate change. They would be a little less than 20 billion, affirms for its part the government, on the strength of the report on the environmental impact of the state budget, which classifies all expenditure into three categories: environmentally friendly, neutral or unfavorable. This difference in assessment is largely explained by the treatment reserved for the tariff shield of 45 billion intended for households: the RAC takes it entirely into account, while the government only includes part of it.
The RAC rightly points out that wealthy households are helped more than low-income households by this transfer and that it is important to put an end to it as soon as possible by deploying structural measures to reduce the use of energy fossils.
There is, however, another type of actor in which it is urgent to take an interest. These are companies, which also benefit from aid granted by the State: most are classified as “neutral” in the government report. However, companies also use fossil fuels on a massive scale and contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, as evidenced by the difficulties they are experiencing due to the increase in the cost of energy and the threats of some to close or relocate their production.
“Hidden welfare state”
A subject that is all the more crucial as a report carried out by economists from the Lille Center for Sociological and Economic Studies and Research (Clersé, University of Lille-CNRS) has just estimated this aid at more than 157 billion euros in 2019, i.e. 30% of the budget of the State, an amount that has increased dramatically since the early 2000s (when they amounted to around 30 billion).
As “there is no administrative document that unifies all of these aids to businesses, no unified harmonized framework allowing their evolution to be monitored over time”, the researchers had to reconstruct this information. At the end of this work, they affirm that we can speak of a “Hidden welfare state in favor of companies” : these public aids indeed represent one of the most important budgetary items of the public administrations without being presented as such.
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