Wednesday, November 8, 2023 in the morning, in front of the audience still barely awake at the Assises de l’Industrie, an event organized in Paris by the weekly The new factoryBruno Le Maire ignites: “Our goal is for industry to represent 15% of GDP [produit intérieur brut] ! » However, the Minister of the Economy and Finance forgets to specify when the government wants to reach this figure. A welcome caution, as the leap envisaged is dizzying.
In 1970, industry represented 20% of national wealth; in 2022, its share was only… 9.5%, according to INSEE measurements. A symbolic collapse of the deindustrialization movement which has hit France for more than half a century, with nearly 2.5 million jobs destroyed.
The government hopes to relegate this national trauma, spread over several decades, to oblivion. In the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, which revealed national shortages in many strategic sectors, the executive put in place, in 2020, a new, more proactive industrial policy. And he never stops praising the results.
Since Emmanuel Macron came to power in 2017, around 120,000 industrial jobs have been created and 314 factories have been built, according to the government. He sees it as the result of his economic and social policy carried out for six years: reform of the labor market, reduction in taxation, particularly corporate taxes and production taxes, and pro-business speeches aimed at foreign investors, received in great fanfare each year at the Palace of Versailles as part of the Choose France operation.
“We are waging an essential battle for the country, that of full employment and reindustrialization. We have made many reforms and we have caught up”welcomed the Head of State, Thursday, November 23, from Chartres, where the Danish laboratory Novo Nordisk announced an investment of 2.1 billion euros in its antidiabetic production site.
“Labor costs remain high”
Except that clouds continue to gather on the horizon. France’s trade deficit is still very high, at 54 billion euros in the first half of 2023, a sign of still precarious industrial health. In the European Union, France is only 22e countries out of 27 regarding the share of industrial employment. New ones represent less than 10% of the total jobs created since 2017 (around 1.3 million), and nearly 60,000 are still vacant, while activity is slowing and the unemployment rate has risen to 7.2%. to 7.4% of assets in the third quarter, according to INSEE.
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