Relocation incentives will not be enough to reduce France’s trade deficit: this is the message sent this Wednesday by the High Commission for Planning (HCP), which asks the Government to focus its efforts on the sectors with the greatest deficit.
“Many horizontal measures have been adopted since 2017 in order to improve the competitiveness and attractiveness of the national production site (reduction of production taxes, corporate tax, Pacte law, ‘turnkey’ industrial sites…” , writes in a note the body led by François Bayrou since its creation in September 2020.
“The HCP proposes to complement these horizontal instruments with vertical industrial policy tools, establishing sector by sector, product by product, strategies for the reconquest of our industry and the recovery of foreign trade”, he continues.
A negative trade balance for two thirds of the products.
Developing strategic productive sectors in France such as electric batteries “is absolutely necessary, but we also have to address the very large shortcomings that represent technologically accessible products that do not interest us”, such as bicycles, wheelchairs or electric stoves. , illustrated François Bayrou during a press conference. To support his statement, the HCP extracted from the data published by Customs the list of 9,781 products exchanged by France with foreign countries.
Two thirds of these products (6,588, or 67%) show a negative trade balance, that is, France imports more than it sells to third countries. But of that total, only a large thousand products show a deficit of more than 50 million euros: salmon, mobile phones, rubber tires… And these products with a highly degraded trade balance represent 87% of the deficit.
Consequently, “taking into account only products with a trade deficit of more than 50 million euros already makes it possible to deal with a very substantial part of the total deficit”, hence the HCP’s call for a better targeted strategy. However, France does not seem to have taken this path yet: between 2019 and 2022, the number of products affected by a deficit of more than 50 million euros fell from 884 to 1,079.
Source: BFM TV
