In fact, industry’s share of French GDP is relatively low. But the observation is not recent.
Marine Le Pen denounced Thursday June 15 on franceinfo the “dramatic situation” of the manufacturing industry in France: “it’s 9% of the GDP in France, it’s 19% in Germany. In a few years, we have gone from 14 to 9%”. Indeed, we find this data on the site of the World Bank, which is interested in the share of “manufacturing” (objects or manufactured products) in the GDP of each country. On the other hand, where Marine Le Pen is imprecise on the temporality. She claims that France has gone from 14% to 9% in “a few years”, while this fall occurs over two decades, since the year 2000.
If we look at the industry as a whole, that is to say the objects that we manufacture, but also the production of energy, the management of water and waste and depollution, the sector weighs 17% in France against 27% in Germany.
It should be noted that our neighbors are very good students in Europe in this area, in particular thanks to their automotive sector. Out of around forty European countries, only Montenegro, Luxembourg, Greece and Cyprus do less well than us when looking at the share of global industry in GDP. Globally, we are in the same waters as the United States and the United Kingdom.
How to explain this place of France?
Like the United Kingdom and the United States, economic players have chosen the tertiary sector, services rather than factories in recent decades, with tourism and finance for example.
French industries have outsourced production costs a lot, relocated. A very fashionable dynamic in the 2000s, so much so that in 2001 the boss of Alcatel, the French telecommunications giant, even said he dreamed of a “factoryless company”.
A dream shared by many, but to which the political class has returned. The shortages of masks during the Covid pandemic, more recently the war in Ukraine, have questioned our energy and industrial independence. And it is not just Marine Le Pen who is calling for a revival of local industries, since it is now a political consensus. Emmanuel Macron also recognizes this, especially in October 2021: “If we do not reindustrialise the country, we will not be able to become a great nation of innovation again”.