Ihe milestone has not been crossed, but the order of magnitude remains dizzying. The French public debt has been approaching 3,000 billion euros for several months. Three to four times more than in 2000. The political color of successive governments does not change the situation: progress has been continuous, punctuated by crises, alarmist reports, warnings from the financial markets and the staging austerity plans never really applied. Each quarterly publication of INSEE gives rise to its share of resigned declarations, denouncing pell-mell the supposed addiction of the country to public spending or the cowardice of a political class always recoiling before the unpopularity of the task.
However, the situation in France is by no means singular. By comparing itself too much to Germany, which is rather an exception in the countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), it sometimes tends to blame itself excessively. In reality, in most Western countries, the public debt has not ceased to grow since the 1970s, as growth slowed down and the financial markets were liberalized, offering States increased financing possibilities.
In absolute value, the American debt has been multiplied by six in twenty years, that of the United Kingdom too. That of Japan, certainly a politically convenient example, has exceeded 200% of GDP for several years. According to the IMF, in developed economies, public debt represented, in 2021, around 120% of GDP on average, i.e. more than one year of income. A ratio twice as high as in emerging countries. Because, paradoxically, the richest countries are also the most indebted. And they are for largely exogenous reasons, beyond their specific political cultures.
Continuously deploy more money
First responsible, the economic crises of the last twenty years, which have forced States to intervene massively to support businesses and households, by constantly deploying more money. The financial crisis of 2008 and then that of Covid-19 doubled the weight of public debt in GDP at the global level, between 2007 and 2020, according to the IMF. Crises have replaced wars, which historically justified massive borrowing. In 1945, France and the United Kingdom had much higher debt ratios – above 250% of GDP – than those observed today. Europe has freed itself from the weight of these liabilities by canceling them, letting inflation eat them away and imposing exceptional levies.
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