Paris (AFP)
Where to find the billions to finance a semiconductor factory or the hydrogen plane?
To stay in the global race for innovation, France favors industrial alliances with other European countries, because it does not have the critical size to support heavy investments on its own.
From the shortage of masks or respirators to Sanofi's initial failure to produce a vaccine against Covid-19, the pandemic will have revealed the extent of French dependence on imports, fueling a feeling of downgrading.
While most developed countries have experienced this phenomenon of deindustrialisation linked to the international division of labor and the move upmarket in developed countries, it has been much more massive in France.
Among the causes identified by the numerous reports which have followed one another over the past ten years, too high labor costs and taxation which have led large companies to relocate massively rather than invest in France to produce and export.
As a result, in 2019, the French manufacturing industry represented only 11% of GDP (and 10% of employment), against 16% on average in the European Union, 17% in Italy, 19% in Switzerland and 22 % in Germany.
To explain this dropout, Philippe Aghion, professor at the College de France, points to an "innovation deficit", measurable in particular in the number of patents per million inhabitants of France, compared to other major industrialized countries.
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"All industries combined, we were ahead of Germany in 1995 but it overtook us".
From telecoms to pharmacies, including cars, textiles - "and even wine" - the country of Pasteur "has lost everywhere, except in nuclear and aeronautics".
As well as in certain niches, such as thermal insulation of buildings or computer-aided design.
- "Mini-Airbus" -
For the author of "The Power of Creative Destruction", the priority is to consolidate the sectors that work, starting with nuclear power, and to invest to develop new ones by supporting young shoots.
It is also necessary to be able to bear the high fixed costs involved in entering a cutting-edge market: for semiconductors, where Asia already occupies solid positions, the entry ticket is estimated at between 20 and 40 billion dollars. 'euros.
Hence the desire of Paris to join forces with other European countries, and to join the EU, in order to increase its investment capacity tenfold.
At the initiative of France and Germany, alliances called "PIIEC" (an important project of common European interest) have already been concluded in electric batteries, hydrogen and soon semiconductors, while waiting for them. space launchers or the "cloud".
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Vincent Charlet, General Delegate of La Fabrique de l'Industrie, doubts, however, that the European ambition is up to the task, given the amounts committed: less than 3 billion euros for the "mini-Airbus of batteries", which will be co-invested by 7 member countries in 17 companies.
Sprinkling.
"France has succeeded in bringing about the emergence of an electronuclear sector" and "a conquering aeronautics sector with its European partners" which gave birth to Airbus, "but to obtain it they used great means", that is to say "one to 2 billion per year".
Economist at CEPII (Center for Prospective Studies and International Information), Thomas Grjebine considers that it is "important to have a European industrial policy".
However, "France will not be able to hope to reindustrialize if macroeconomic divergences persist within the euro zone".
He recalls that the "demand reduction policy" initiated by Germany at the end of the 1990s "played a role in the acceleration of deindustrialisation in France", Berlin having "gained market share to the detriment of his neighbors".
This is evidenced by the gap between the French trade deficit, which in 2020 approached 70 billion euros, and a German surplus, although in decline because of the crisis, which reached 180 billion euros.
An imbalance that is likely to continue if the German conservatives win the elections in September, according to him.
"France's efforts to lower its production taxes are destroyed if the neighbors compress their demand and do not buy your products", illustrates Mr. Grjebine.
© 2021 AFP