France can further reduce corporate taxes by €10-15 bn – Le Maire | Photo credits: The World Bank / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
PARIS, Feb 15 (Reuters) – France can afford between 10 and 15 billion euros in additional corporate tax cuts without jeopardizing its strategy to restore public finances, the minister of finance said on Tuesday. Economy, Finance and Recovery, Bruno Le Maire.
Since the start of Emmanuel Macron’s five-year term in 2017, the State has lowered taxes on companies by 26 billion euros, including 10 billion in taxes linked to turnover or the number of employees, which companies generate. a profit or not.
These “production taxes” nevertheless remain significantly higher than in other European countries, and Bruno Le Maire has recently pleaded several times for a further reduction in these charges in order to make French companies more competitive.
“We can go further in tax cuts but in a quantum that I have estimated at 10-15 billion euros,” said the Minister of Economy and Finance during an economic conference on the presidential election in April.
Such a range would be “reasonable” if France wants to stick to its public finance recovery schedule and bring the public deficit below the threshold of 3% of gross domestic product in 2027, against a 2022 deficit estimated at 5%.
In a study on Tuesday, the economic studies institute Rexecode estimates that France would have to reduce its production taxes by 30 billion euros to even return to the average of the European Union. (Report Leigh Thomas; French version Jean-Stéphane Brosse, edited by Sophie Louet)