THE QUESTION
. This is the new invigorating leitmotif of Bruno Le Maire in this return to school which is in search of reasons for hope. "
Barring a health accident, we could return to our pre-crisis activity level faster than expected, at the end of 2021 and not at the beginning of 2022
", declared the
Minister of the Economy
last week in an interview with the
Sud Ouest
daily.
of Finance and Recovery. And, since then, he continues to hammer home the good news, two days ago at the Four Morning Truths of France 2 and this Wednesday, August 25 at the Hippodrome Paris Longchamp where the Medef's end of summer meetings were held.
Eighteen months after the outbreak of the health crisis and the first confinement of March 17, 2020, which plunged economic indicators into the abyss in an unprecedented way since World War II, the economy is experiencing a long recovery.
The recovery that began in the summer of 2020 is indeed particularly chaotic under the influence of the whims of Covid-19 and its variants.
Read also Recovery plan: does France gain by getting into debt via the European Union?
Quarterly GDP growth figures have never been more erratic: fall of 5.9% in the first quarter of 2020, followed by a collapse of 13.6% in the second, then a rebound of 18.8% in the third, and a decline of 1% in the fourth with the second wave of the virus. The year 2021 started with zero economic growth in the first quarter (which corresponded to the second wave) and then rebounded by 0.9% of GDP in the second. And despite the fourth wave, that of the delta variant, INSEE is now counting on an acceleration during the second half of the year, which should make it possible to achieve annual growth of nearly 6% over the whole of 2021.
There is obviously something to get lost in these quarterly oscillations and we will leave it to everyone to check the arithmetic of these figures (it is quite exact, let us underline it!). The simplest and most significant in reality is to look at the absolute level we are at and take the fourth quarter of 2019 “
before the pandemic
” as a reference. However, to this day, private companies and public services are still working at an average rate of 3.3% lower than it was then. This is obviously a clear improvement compared to April 2020, at the worst of the depression, when the thermometer recorded a "
minus 15%
Gloomy memory, but there is still work to be done.
Can Bruno Le Maire win his bet?
Can the economic situation go from the -3.3% degree that characterized it at the beginning of this summer, according to the corroborating data from INSEE and the Bank of France, to return next December to its level of December 2019?
CHECKS
.
The Bercy scenario assumes that "
there will be no
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