Is “over-administration” costing France “3% of GDP”?

• The philosopher Gaspard Koenig assures us that “over-administration” costs “3% of GDP” to the French economy.

• This percentage comes from an OECD study that the philosopher misinterpreted.

• Moreover, administrative “simplification”, which he places at the heart of his “Simple” political movement, does not guarantee that costs will disappear.

He wants to make things "simple", like the name of his political movement which is holding its first meeting on Monday.

The philosopher Gaspard Koenig, of liberal inspiration, intends to slay "the bureaucratic hell that excludes, discriminates, oppresses".

In an interview with France Info this Sunday, he proposes to “divide by 100 the number of standards that govern our lives in our country”.

An extreme "simplification" which, to understand it, would be done for a good cause: "To simplify, it is first of all to return a lot of economic activities to the country, since all the activities which are today inhibited can be deployed. .

The cost of over-administration in the country is sometimes estimated at 3% of GDP, ”assured Gaspard Koenig.

The percentage strikes people, but is it correct?

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, the “Simple” movement of Gaspard Koenig did not specify the source of its figure. But if you dig a little deeper, you come across an OECD study published in 2010 called “Better lawmaking in Europe”. It proposes an estimate of the “total cost of administrative burdens weighing on businesses”. Based on data collected between 2006 and early 2008, the OECD estimates this cost at 60 billion euros per year. This represents 3% of the GDP at the time, taking as a basis that of 2007.

End of the story ?

Not quite, because several criticisms can be made.

The first: Gaspard Koenig confuses the terms.

While it talks about the cost of "over-administration", the OECD refers to the administration as a whole.

In other words, it is impossible to reduce its "cost" to zero, except to completely eliminate the administration, and therefore the state.

What Gaspard Koenig does not want, who defends a “liberal Jacobinism” where the State would have a role to play in ensuring the freedom and autonomy of individuals.

An accounting approach

The second criticism relates to the figure itself. To arrive at this total of 60 billion euros, the OECD applied the method known as “standard costs” (or SCM,

). It consists of estimating the time required for each administrative task (filling out documents, sending files), and multiplying it by the hourly cost of the workers assigned to this task and by the number of companies.

For researcher Fabien Gélédan, a specialist in the modernization of the State, this accounting approach, based solely on the burden on companies, obscures a whole part of reality.

In an article published in 2016, he believes that the cost method prevents "any reference to the efficiency or social utility of such or such regulation".

For example, the existence of the research tax credit (CIR) allows companies to benefit from a tax deduction… on condition that they fill out a form.

In other words, this administrative “burden” can actually generate a profit in the long run.

A simplification that costs

The last criticism is that the administrative “simplification” demanded by Gaspard Koenig may itself generate new costs.

In a 2016 report devoted to this subject, the Council of State recalled, for example, that dematerialization (sending of documents by email, online declaration) could be “an exclusion factor when recourse to the Internet is imposed on all users. public ”.

“In the tax services, you have fewer people to greet users at the counters, because of digitization.

As a result, when there is a problem or when advice is needed, people queue up longer, ”illustrates Jean-Michel Nathanson, national secretary of Solidaires Finances Publiques.

All of this shows how complex the subject of "simplification" is and not just a percentage of GDP.

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