Bruno Le Maire has been the Minister of the Economy since May 2017. – CHAMUSSY / SIPA
The government has raised its forecast for France’s public deficit and debt in 2021, a consequence of growth which should be lower than expected due to new health restrictions, the Minister of the Economy and Finance announced on Sunday. Bruno Le Maire. “We estimate the public deficit for 2021 at 9%, instead of the 8.5% which had been entered in the initial finance bill and we estimate that the public debt will fall from 115% to 118% in 2021”, declared this Sunday the Minister during the television program Grand Jury LCI-RTL-Le Figaro.
Bruno Le Maire had previously announced in Sunday Newspaper a downward revision of one point of the growth forecast in 2021, to 5% instead of 6% until then, in order to take into account the effects of the new restrictive measures taken this week to fight against the Covid pandemic- 19. “Closing schools and 150,000 businesses is essential to curb the circulation of the virus. But these measures will have an impact on the French economy. We are therefore going to revise our growth from 6% to 5% for 2021 ”, while the French GDP had contracted by 8.2% in 2020, said the minister in JDD appeared this Sunday.
“Mechanically, that has an impact on the deficit and on the debt”, specified this Sunday the minister to the Grand Jury LCI-RTL-Le Figaro, believing that this revision is both “fair and sincere”. The Governor of the Banque de France François Villeroy de Galhau for his part estimated Thursday that the restrictions announced this week “should not lead to a very significant revision of (his) forecast” of 5.5% growth for 2021 if they do not last beyond “early May”.