Faced with the second wave of Coronavirus in France, Emmanuel Macron announced new restrictive measures on Wednesday.
Among them, the establishment of a curfew which could last six weeks in the big cities and which will have many economic consequences.
Nicolas Barré takes stock of a current economic issue.
The measures announced by the President of the Republic will have serious economic consequences.
Save lives or save the economy?
Since the start of the Covid crisis, this trade-off between health and the economy has been a headache for all governments on the planet.
Every time we tighten the screw on sanitary, the economic cost runs into billions of euros, thousands of business failures and hundreds of thousands of jobs threatened or lost.
700,000 in the first half of the year alone.
The eight weeks of spring confinement had dropped national wealth by a third.
The new turn of the screw announced this Wednesday evening by Emmanuel Macron will certainly have a lower economic cost, but it is a very hard blow for the sectors of hotels, cafes, restaurants, tourism and even culture.
Many restaurants that will be forced to close in the evening will not open at noon for example.
These sectors are those which were most affected by the first wave.
Together with transport and aeronautics, all of these sectors represent 10% of the French economy.
However, it is these same parts of our economy that will pay the economic price of the curfew.
Almost a third of the 700,000 jobs already destroyed this year have been in these sectors which have lost up to half of their turnover as is the case for hotels and restaurants and aeronautics, according to the reports. calculations by OFCE, the economic research institute.
We are therefore talking about tens of thousands of companies that suffered from the first wave, which were just starting to take their heads out of the water, and which will now suffer the full force of the second wave.
It's devastating!
Unfortunately, there will be permanent damage.
In hotels, restaurants and culture, spending is a third less than it was before the crisis.
It is therefore clear that some of the jobs lost will not come back, or at least not for a long time.
The curfew will nevertheless be accompanied by new aid.
The partial unemployment schemes will indeed be extended.
There will be new facilities for obtaining state guaranteed loans.
And on the social side, the Head of State also announced the payment of new exceptional aid of 150 euros for the most precarious (beneficiaries of RSA and APL) plus 100 euros per child.
But beyond these measures, the big economic stake in the coming months will be not to destroy the momentum that the recovery plan must bring.
It is the risk of this curfew which hits regions and metropolises (Ile-de-France, Lille, Lyon, Toulouse, Aix-Marseille, etc.) which are, at bottom, the pillars of our economy.