LGross domestic product (GDP) growth in France has only been around 1% per year since 2010, and will reach a stable figure of around 0.8% in 2025. Everything indicates that this growth will stabilize sustainably below the 1% per year threshold.
These weak dynamics give rise to a series of negative impacts: slowing tax revenue growth; the region’s lack of attractiveness for investors, both French and foreign; increased incentives for savers to invest their money abroad; low surplus to be distributed between employees and the company, and therefore increasing tensions in value sharing. This sluggish growth forecast may be justified, as unfavorable factors for the French economy are accumulating.
First, there is a decline in labor productivity: in the second quarter of 2025, it will still be 2.2% below the level of productivity in the spring of 2019, which was the highest point in history. Some of the causes are cyclical (the survival of underperforming businesses due to “Covid relief”, the development of apprenticeships, etc.), but most are structural: the deterioration of the education system, as shown by survey results from the OECD international program for monitoring student achievement (PISA); inadequate skill levels of the working population, according to the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Skills survey; low corporate research and development spending (1.5% of GDP, compared with 2.4% in Germany and 2.8% in the United States); lack of investment in new technology.
The second unfavorable factor, demographic aging. The population aged 20-64 years, which is the driver of activity, increased from 54.2% in 2020 to 54% in 2025, and will reach 53.6% in 2030. The decline in the fertility rate (1.62 in 2024) reinforces this trend, with the number of births lower than the number of deaths.
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