Tribune Between 2009 and 2015, when the country was massively destroying industrial employment, around fifty employment zones continued to create industrial employment. There is therefore no inevitability. The local effect – the characteristics and dynamics specific to a given territory – has long been underestimated by our industrial policies.
However, it represents 38% of the dynamics of industrial employment in a territory, against 52% for macroeconomic conditions (on which, in a context of globalization, the policy makers’ room for maneuver is limited), and only 10% for the effect of sectoral specialization (Denis Carré, Philippe Frocrain and Nadine Levratto, The Astonishing Disparity of Industrial Territories. Understanding performance and decline, Factory of Industry, 2019).
The reindustrialization imperative, reinforced by the health crisis, is a unique opportunity to connect our territories, rural and medium-sized towns, to the national economic story. Our national cohesion is at stake. 75% of French industrial jobs are located outside metropolitan areas; 71% of foreign industrial investment projects are carried out in municipalities with less than 20,000 inhabitants.
Several challenges to overcome
The setting up of the Territories of Industry program is a first response. It enabled the selection of 146 territories at the end of 2018. In three years, these territories led by an elected local-industrial team have supported more than 3,200 industrial projects. It is the result of an unprecedented partnership between manufacturers, the State, regions, inter-municipal authorities and public operators.
For forty years, these territories have been excluded from public economic development policies, as if only metropolises and their value-added services counted. They showed that their dynamic and their desire for industry in our country were still there.
Obviously, several challenges still remain to be taken up: productive land, the scarcity of which will increase in the coming years and without which relocation and reindustrialisation projects cannot be realized; the availability of skills, which has been a crying knot in the development of our productive tool for years; and finally the social acceptability of industry: many industrial projects are blocked by litigation.
Restoring cohesion through the economy
This last point should guide collective reflection. The success of reindustrialisation will be based on a simple observation: a powerful industry is an essential element in responding to certain major challenges of this century (environment, sovereignty, cohesion).
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