Emmanuel Macron will undoubtedly not resist the temptation to recall it during his televised intervention, Wednesday evening: since 2017, France has been recreating industrial jobs while it had been destroying them for at least ten years. The Head of State repeats it as soon as he has the opportunity, as in the summer, in front of the employees of the CAF factory, in Bagnères-de-Bigorre (Hautes-Pyrénées). “We are in the process of warding off what seemed inevitable in our country, he was enthusiastic, referring to the decline of the textile industry and the relocations that have hit the region. We can become a great industrial nation again. “ He is not the only one, nor the first, to promise it. Almost all the candidates defend, these days, the virtues of an offensive industrial policy, provider of well-paid jobs and guardian of a sovereignty. The twenty months of the pandemic have, in any case, put this theme back at the heart of the campaign.
The subject, too, is not new. The successive attempts by the public authorities to curb the phenomenon of deindustrialisation, which has hit France harder than other similar countries since the 1970s, have led to a pile of plans and devices that are not always well articulated, points out the Court of accounts in a note published Tuesday, December 14. At the risk of damaging their efficiency and their distribution in the productive fabric. “During the last decade, every two to three years, the public authorities have announced industrial plans and strategies, referring, as the case may be, to the objectives of sovereignty or national independence, strategic autonomy , remediation of market failures, support for industrial restructuring and their territorial impact ”, writes the Court.
On arrival, the public resources committed are colossal: costed between 17 and 20 billion euros per year in 2019 by France Strategy, they are still higher today with the measures adopted for two years (lower production taxes, recovery plan, France 2030). Without it being possible for all that to finely assess their effectiveness, these objectives being “Associated with means indicators”, corn “Rarely to results indicators “, judge the Court. Thus, despite the sums mobilized, there is no budgetary document listing the financial effort under industrial policy in an exhaustive manner, the information being dispersed in about ten different programs.
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