Four economists have just published what French administrations have rarely produced officially: a projection of public finances under unchanged policy, without political embellishment. The result is unambiguous: at constant trajectory, the deficit would reach 6.8% of GDP in 2030 and debt would exceed 130% of GDP, compared to the 60% threshold set by European treaties. Simply bringing debt back to its current level by 2032 would require a cumulative effort of 126 billion euros, or roughly 25 billion per year over five years.

The Essentials

  • Four independent economists quantify the budgetary trajectory “under unchanged policy” in a new methodological exercise: the result is a deficit of 6.8% of GDP in 2030 and debt exceeding 130% of GDP.
  • Stopping the progression of debt would require a cumulative adjustment of 126 billion euros by 2032, according to the Jaravel-Ragot-Tavernier-Valla report mandated by the Ministers of Economy and Public Accounts, with support from the IGF.
  • The report constitutes less an austerity program than an act of methodological transparency: naming the constraint is the condition for debating the choices that make it possible to address it.
  • The identified levers combine spending, revenue, and structural reforms: the effort does not reduce to a logic of cuts, but the political margin for distributing it remains entirely to be built.
  • Budgetary transparency without institutional anchoring remains fragile: this report constrains no government and can remain without consequence if no political force makes it its compass.

France Had Never Produced This Document

Most large democracies have an independent institution responsible for projecting public finances without government filter. The Congressional Budget Office in the United States has produced ten-year projections since 1975. The Office for Budget Responsibility in the United Kingdom has done the same since 2010. In France, the High Council of Public Finances verifies the consistency of government forecasts, but does not publish an autonomous trajectory under unchanged policy.

This gap is not an accident. The “unchanged policy” projection is politically uncomfortable by construction: it shows what happens if nobody decides anything, which amounts to making visible the cost of inaction. Successive governments have had little interest in commissioning such an exercise. The Jaravel-Ragot-Tavernier-Valla report, mandated by the Ministers of Economy (Roland Lescure) and Public Accounts (David Amiel), with technical support from the IGF, thus constitutes a methodological precedent as much as a quantified document.

Xavier Jaravel is an economist at the London School of Economics, specializing in innovation and inequality. Xavier Ragot chairs the French Observatory of Economic Conditions. Lionel Tavernier and Jean-Pierre Valla come from the administration. Their mission was not to propose an alternative budget, but to build a methodology making it possible to project the trajectory of public finances without the optimistic assumptions that traditionally color official documents.

The result is an X-ray, not a prescription.

The Concrete Scope of the “Unchanged Policy” Hypothesis

The notion deserves to be clarified, as it is often misunderstood. An “unchanged policy” projection does not mean that spending remains frozen. It means that policies already voted continue to produce their effects: health spending increases with aging, debt interest grows with the accumulated stock, pensions follow their legal trajectory. No new cost-saving measures, no additional reforms are integrated.

This is precisely why the figure of 6.8% deficit in 2030 is significant. It does not describe a catastrophic scenario: it describes what happens mechanically if France does nothing different from what it does today. Debt at 130% of GDP is not a crisis projection, but the arithmetic result of already-engaged trends.

The gap between this trajectory and France’s European commitments is striking. The Stability and Growth Pact sets a ceiling of 3% deficit and 60% debt. France has frequently exceeded the first since 2008, although it respected it in 2018 and 2019; it has exceeded the second since the early 2000s, debt already reaching 66.8% of GDP in 2007, before even the financial crisis. The question of which spending to protect from the adjustment effort is already posed in political debate: this report forces it to be posed with precise figures rather than general intentions.

Debt interest plays here a mechanical role that deserves attention. With public debt at 115.6% of GDP at the end of 2025 (INSEE), estimated at 117-118% of GDP in 2026 according to the Jaravel et al. report, and rates back at levels higher than a decade earlier, the annual debt service charge reached 64.7 billion euros in 2025 in national accounting, according to INSEE data. At 130% of GDP, this charge would become structurally constraining, absorbing an increasing share of budgetary margins before the government even chooses anything.

126 Billion: The Mechanics of a Figure

The figure of 126 billion euros deserves to be broken down so as not to be misused. It represents the cumulative effort necessary over the period 2027-2032, to be undertaken imperatively from 2027, that is, by the end of the next five-year term, to simply stabilize the debt/GDP ratio at its current level. It does not aim to bring debt back to 60% of GDP, or even 100%. It aims to stop the progression.

Translated to one year, this gives roughly 25 billion euros of annual effort, or slightly less than 1% of French GDP. To give a scale: the National Education budget represents roughly 60 billion euros per year, Defense roughly 47 billion after recent increases. An effort of 25 billion annually is therefore considerable, but it does not represent liquidation of the State: it represents a reorientation.

The question the report opens without deciding is that of the distribution of this effort between spending and revenue. The economists who conducted the mission do not prescribe any particular mix. They identify margins on both sides. On the spending side, the international comparisons cited in the report suggest that France presents notable gaps with its neighbors in several items, without the results necessarily being commensurate with this relative effort. On the revenue side, margins are narrower due to a level of compulsory contributions among the highest in the OECD, but tax expenditures represent tens of billions of euros in tax benefits whose efficiency is unequal.

What the report does not do is as revealing as what it does. It does not propose a list of cuts. It does not prioritize. It builds a common base of reality on which political debate can rely: or not.

Budgetary Transparency as a Governance Issue

France has a tradition of public finances that are not very transparent, in the technical sense of the term. Government projections integrate growth assumptions that are regularly optimistic, savings “to be identified” in stability programs, and structural reforms whose effects are accounted for before being voted. The High Council of Public Finances has documented this several times.

This opacity is not specific to one government or one party. It is structural: it stems from the way budget documents are constructed, the incentives of administrations to present credible trajectories before Brussels, and the political difficulty of publicly projecting a high deficit without creating an effect of panic or immediate controversy. French productivity is improving, but without bridging its underlying gap: the same mechanism of partial denial is observed in structural macroeconomic data.

The precedent created by the Jaravel-Ragot-Tavernier-Valla report is methodological in nature. It shows that a public body can mandate an independent team to produce a de-optimized projection without the sky falling. It creates a benchmark against which future government projections can be compared. And it makes it more difficult for any government to present manifestly unrealistic trajectories without this being contested with precise data.

This is what institutional economists call an informational public good: a common reference that improves the quality of collective debate, regardless of each person’s political positions. England took twenty years to build the legitimacy of its OBR. France has just laid its first stone.

The Limitations of a Report Without Political Mandate

Transparency is necessary. It is not sufficient. The history of budgetary reports in France is one of a graveyard of excellent analyses without operational follow-up. The Pébereau report on public debt, published in 2005, drew a comparable diagnosis in terms of severity. Its recommendations were not followed.

Debt continued to progress.

The Jaravel-Ragot-Tavernier-Valla report shares this structural limitation: it constrains no government. It has no implementation mechanism. It is not backed by any permanent institution that would produce this type of projection each year, with the credibility that regularity gives. Without durable institutional anchoring, the precedent can remain isolated.

The impact of such a document depends on the appropriation made of it by political actors to structure their own platform: parties commit to quantified trajectories, Parliament uses it as a reference in budget debates, media use it to evaluate electoral promises. Transparency without appropriation remains a symbolic act.

There are signals that this appropriation is possible. Several economists close to different political sensibilities have praised the report’s method, including voices critical of the current government’s economic orientation. The Court of Accounts regularly produces reports in a comparable spirit. And the pressure of financial markets, which continuously evaluate the credibility of French budgetary trajectories, creates an external incentive that governments cannot entirely ignore.

The Real Levers Identified by the Report

Beyond the snapshot, the report opens concrete avenues. Three deserve to be mentioned without being overinterpreted.

The first concerns operating expenses of the State and local authorities. The international comparisons cited in the report suggest that France has margins on the side of current spending, distinct from investment and social protection spending. The point is not that there must be “less State,” but that certain spending has measurable declining returns. Building public infrastructure does not automatically produce expected effects: the logic applies to other items as well.

The second concerns tax expenditures. France has several hundred tax expenditure provisions for a total amount estimated at more than 90 billion euros per year according to the Court of Accounts. Their efficiency is very unequal: some support productive investments, others constitute rents without verifiable counterpart. A methodical review of this stock, without sectoral taboos, represents a significant lever on the revenue side without increasing tax rates.

The third concerns structural reforms with deferred budgetary returns. The economists of the report explicitly mention that the adjustment effort can be eased by reforms that improve potential growth. The question of labor productivity, vocational training, administrative simplification: each of these challenges has an indirect budgetary impact, more difficult to quantify but real over a ten-year trajectory.

These levers have nothing austerity-minded in the strict sense. They require difficult choices and trade-offs between interest groups. But they show that an adjustment of 126 billion is not necessarily synonymous with brutal cuts in public services or widespread tax increases: it is a space of decision, not a destiny.

A Precedent to Be Institutionalized

The permanence of this exercise remains its principal challenge. A one-off exercise, however rigorous, does not durably transform the culture of public decision-making. What changes practices is a permanent institution, endowed with a stable method, that publishes each year an independent projection and can be held accountable for its quality.

France could draw inspiration from existing models without copying them identically. The American CBO is integrated into Congress, which gives it strong parliamentary legitimacy. The British OBR is independent of the government but linked to the budget cycle. Both function because they are regular, public, and their projections are used as reference in parliamentary debate.

In France, this would require either an extension of the mandate of the High Council of Public Finances, or the creation of an ad hoc structure. Both options have supporters in the academic and administrative worlds. The Jaravel-Ragot-Tavernier-Valla report gives them an additional argument: the methodology exists, credibility is demonstrated, the precedent is laid.

Progress in budgetary governance rarely resembles a notable reform. It more closely resembles the accumulation of precedents that gradually shift what is considered normal. Naming the actual trajectory was, until this report, considered politically imprudent. It now becomes an available reference point. The next step depends on those who decide to seize it.

Sources

  1. Report of the mission on public finance transparency, Jaravel, Ragot, Tavernier, Valla / General Inspectorate of Finance
  2. High Council of Public Finances, annual opinions on government projections (hcfp.fr)
  3. Court of Accounts, reports on the situation and prospects of public finances (ccomptes.fr)
  4. Pébereau Report on public debt, 2005 (French Government Publications)
  5. Congressional Budget Office (CBO), methodological documentation on unchanged policy projections (cbo.gov)
  6. Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), Economic and fiscal outlook (obr.uk)
  7. IGF Report - Public Finance Transparency Mission (July 15, 2026)
  8. INSEE - Flash Report No. 78 (2026): debt and deficit 2025
  9. Official Bercy Press Release - launch of the mission (May 26, 2026)
  10. Court of Accounts - State budget report 2025 (April 2026)
  11. Official HCFP website
  12. Congressional Budget Office - official history
  13. France Info - history of French public deficit
  14. Wikipedia / FIPECO - history of French public debt
  15. IGF - Jaravel-Ragot-Tavernier-Valla Report (official primary source)
  16. INSEE - National accounts APU 2025 (debt 115.6% of GDP)
  17. Senate/budget.gouv.fr - Stability and Growth Pact rules
  18. Court of Accounts (via France Savings) - Tax expenditures 91.83 billion euros
  19. INSEE - Rate of compulsory contributions EU
  20. HCFP - Official missions
  21. Senate - Draft budget law 2026 Financial commitments (debt service)
  22. Wikipedia - French public debt (historical Eurostat/INSEE data)
  23. Reuters / Yahoo Finance - Jaravel Report (English summary)
  24. OBR - Official website
  25. OFCE - Xavier Ragot president
  26. Senate - Draft budget law 2025, debt service