PARIS: French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire will announce a slashed government growth forecast for 2024 in an interview with a TV channel on Sunday evening, French media reported.
The reports said that due to slower growth at the end of last year and weak expectations for the first half of 2024, the government would have to lower its full-year 1.4 percent GDP growth forecast and announce new reductions in state spending.
An online paper reported that the 2024 forecast will be cut to around 1 percent and that Le Maire will announce spending cuts of twenty billion euros over two years.
It said that he would lower the forecast to 0.9 percent and would announce a ten billion euro savings plan.
The European Commission on February 15 cut its 2024 GDP growth forecast for France to 0.9 percent from the 1.2 percent seen in November, and it cut its forecast for Germany – the EU’s biggest economy – to 0.3 percent from 0.8 percent.
OECD Slashes French Growth Forecast
Earlier this month, the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development slashed its 2024 French growth forecast to 0.6 percent from 0.8 percent previously.
France’s official statistics agency INSEE on February 7 forecasted that the euro zone’s second-biggest economy was set to expand just 0.2 percent in the first quarter from the previous 3 months when it flatlined, and that it would maintain that rate in the 2nd quarter.
