Tfall for our public finances. Budgetary debates are getting bogged down, while the situation has never been so catastrophic, with a deficit expected to exceed 6% this year. The milestone of 1,000 billion in debt accumulated since Emmanuel Macron's first five-year term was exceeded a few weeks ago.
This Monday, November 25, another deadline has just been reached. From this day on, public administrations have exhausted all their resources and are now living on credit, according to calculations made by the Molinari Economic Institute, a liberal think tank, on revenue and expenditure data for 2023 published by the INSEE.
“This calculation has an educational purpose: for households who think in terms of the number of days before the arrival of pay, this helps illustrate the problem of the extent of our deficit,” explains Nicolas Marques, general director of the Molinari Economic Institute. France must therefore live on credit for 36 days. This is certainly not new. Never since 1978 has France ended the year without having spent all its euros (or francs at the time).
97 days credit to the State
But some years have been less catastrophic. In 1979 and 1980, administrations spent only 4 days living on credit. “The deterioration of our public finances begins at that moment: our growth begins to decline and our spending to increase, largely because demographics have become less favorable,” underlines Nicolas Marques. Other years, however, have been much worse: in 2020, the year of Covid, we spent all our resources on November 8… that is 53 days without money in the coffers! We have raised the bar slightly, but the drift remains significant.
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Kangaroo of the day
Answer
If we differentiate between administrations, the State had exhausted its resources on September 24, 2023, i.e. 97 days before the end of the year. For social security administrations, it was December 19 (11 days before the end of the year). Finally, local authorities were still in the green at the end of the year, and could hold out until January 5 of the following year.
If we compare France with other European countries, the data are slightly different, because Eurostat and INSEE do not use the same accounting conventions. But France remains above the European average (26 days), with 35 days of credit. Portugal, Ireland, Denmark and Cyprus are good students: they finished the year in the green!
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