BERLIN (Reuters) – European Economic Affairs Commissioner Paolo Gentiloni intends to set national debt ceilings for European Union (EU) member states as part of the reform of the Stability and growth (PSC) which he intends to present in mid-2022, he told the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ).
The application of this text, which sets the budgetary rules to be respected by European countries, has been suspended since March 2020 to take into account the repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic on the public finances of member states. This derogation clause is expected to expire at the end of 2022 and the European Commission launched a debate in the autumn on the reform of this pact.
“We cannot put all countries on the same level. The differences in debt ratios are currently too large for this to be possible,” Paolo Gentiloni said Wednesday by the German business daily.
Measures to support the economy during the acute phase of the health crisis as well as investments intended to support the resumption of growth have raised the debt of many states well beyond the current limit, set at 60% of the proceeds. gross domestic (GDP).
In France, public debt, which represented 97.5% of GDP at the end of 2019, before the emergence of the health crisis, stood at 116.3% of GDP at the end of September 2021, according to INSEE.
Paolo Gentiloni declared that the reform he will bring will set debt targets individualized by country, specifying that he wanted the Commission to have more effective instruments to ensure compliance with budgetary rules by the Member States.
He also rejected the proposal by Klaus Regling, the director general of the European Stability Mechanism, to raise the debt ceiling to 100% of GDP for all of the Twenty-Seven.
“It just does not correspond to my idea of a differentiated view of states,” he told FAZ.
(Report Riham Alkousaa, French version Myriam Rivet, edited by Jean-Stéphane Brosse)
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