The pension reform adopted in April was to bring the system back into balance by the end of the decade. An overly ambitious goal, according to the Pensions Orientation Council, which presents its annual report on Thursday.
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Missed objective. The reform adopted with forceps in April will not bring financial equilibrium back as promised in 2030, estimates the Pensions Orientation Council (COR), which on the contrary predicts a return “sustainable” deficits as of next year, according to a report which will be officially presented on Thursday 22 June.
The pension reform, with the decline of the legal age from 62 to 64, was to reset the counters and the system to balance at the end of the decade. But this will not be enough: taken as a whole, the forty or so existing regimes “would remain permanently in deficit”writes the COR in its annual report.
Curb spending
After a post-Covid parenthesis marked by unusual surpluses (4.4 billion euros last year, another 3.6 billion expected this year), the relapse is announced from 2024 and would fluctuate until 2030 between 0.2 and 0.3 points of GDP (gross domestic product), or between 5 and 8 billion per year.
Beyond that, the accounts would remain in the red in three of the four scenarios studied and would only return to the green“after 2045” in the best case. However, the situation would be worse without the reform, which will limit the number of retirees and therefore curb spending.
But revenues will also slow, mainly due to staffing and salary restrictions among civil servants. The last increase in the index point (1.5% in July) was however not taken into account. This explains why the future deficits would come first from the system of territorial and hospital agents (CNRACL), which would experience “financing needs over the entire period and in all scenarios”.