What is holding back French growth?
France’s growth ought to be strong: Demand is boosted by subdued inflation, low interest rates, the increase in the fiscal deficit and high corporate profitability; S upply of goods and services is boosted by improving cost competitiveness, corporate tax cuts and the rise in the participation rate. Yet even when one takes into account one-off factors (the strikes), France’s growth was quite weak in 2019 under the effect of: The weakness of global trade and exports (shaving 0.6 percentage point off growth); The rise in the household savings rate (0.6 percentage point); The weakness of housing investment (0.1 percentage point), which, altogether, reduced year-on-year growth by 1.3 percentage points. Elsewhere: Corporate investment is solid; Inventories slipped only in the fourth quarter of 2019.