France

01Structure

France has deindustrialised further than any other large European economy. Industry accounted for around a quarter of value added in 1980 and is now near a tenth¹ — a lower share than Italy, and roughly half Germany's. What replaced it is not a single sector but several unusually concentrated ones: aerospace, luxury goods, nuclear engineering, agriculture and food, and tourism.

The result is an economy whose export strength sits in a small number of very large firms rather than in a broad base of mid-sized ones. That is the mirror image of the German Mittelstand described on that page, and it produces a different risk profile: less exposure to a general capital cycle, more to the fortunes of individual champions and to the aircraft order book.

Research spending, at just over two per cent of GDP, sits below the European Union's target and well below Germany's — a persistent gap for an economy that competes in aerospace and pharmaceuticals.

02Trade and exposure

France exports about a third of its output, appreciably less than Germany and closer to the European norm for an economy of its size. Aeronautics and defence are the sectors that move the trade balance, and their delivery schedules can shift a quarter's figures on their own.

The persistent feature of the French external account is a goods deficit alongside surpluses in services and in agriculture and food. Unlike Italy or Germany, France does not run a manufacturing surplus, and has not for some years — which is the trade account restating the deindustrialisation in section 01.

03Energy and resources

France is the least energy-dependent large economy in Europe, importing about two fifths of the energy it uses against Germany's two thirds and Italy's three quarters. The reason is a single decision taken in the 1970s and never reversed: nuclear power.

Around seventy per cent of French electricity is nuclear, and nuclear together with renewables covers roughly ninety-five per cent of generation.² France is Europe's largest net exporter of electricity, and electricity-intensive industry — aluminium, chemicals, and increasingly data centres — has a structural cost advantage over the same industry elsewhere in the euro area.

The exposure that remains is not price but availability: an economy this concentrated in one generating technology is exposed to correlated outages across a reactor fleet of common design, as the corrosion inspections of 2022 demonstrated. That is a different kind of risk from Germany's or Italy's, and it does not show up in an import-dependency ratio at all.

04Labour and demography

The employment rate among 20- to 64-year-olds is around seventy-five per cent — below Germany's and well above Italy's — and youth unemployment runs above twenty per cent, roughly three times the German figure and among the highest in Western Europe. That gap between the overall rate in the panel above and the youth rate is the most persistent structural feature of the French labour market.

Successive reforms since 2017 have loosened dismissal rules, reorganised unemployment insurance and expanded apprenticeships, and the unemployment rate has fallen over that period. Whether the youth gap narrows with it is the question that decides how much of the improvement is structural.

05Public finances

French public spending exceeds fifty-five per cent of GDP, the highest in the OECD.¹ That is the defining fiscal fact and it is a deliberate social choice rather than a failure of control — it buys a pension system, a health system and family policy that are unusually comprehensive. It also leaves very little room to raise revenue further.

The deficit has run above five per cent of GDP, well beyond the European treaty reference value, and debt is on a path toward and past a hundred and fifteen per cent of output.³ France has been downgraded by rating agencies more than once in recent years. Because the debt figure in the panel above is the Maastricht measure, it is directly comparable with the German and Italian pages — which is the point of that definition.

06Money and prices

France has set no policy rate of its own since 1999; the rate shown above is the European Central Bank's. As the second-largest economy in the currency area, French conditions carry weight in that decision without determining it.

The specific asymmetry for France is that its fiscal position is looser than the currency area's average while its inflation history is closer to the middle of it. Monetary policy set for the aggregate is therefore tighter, in fiscal terms, for France than for a member with more room — the transmission runs through the sovereign spread rather than through the policy rate itself.

07What the models expect

These are computed on this site from each series' own history, and are nobody's official projection. The bar is the range the figure lands in half the time; the dot is the central path.

Replayed from past origins on today's revised figures, the same baseline was usually off by 0.68 on consumer price inflation, 2.29 on real gdp, 0.24 on unemployment rate, 0.60 on central bank policy rate, 3.17 on government debt.

08Structural indicators

The figures behind the sections above. They move by a point or two a year, so each carries the year it was measured.

09Sources and method

Live figures: Eurostat, Bank for International Settlements. Each is fetched nightly and validated before publication; the delivery report on /status/ says how old every one of them is. Profile written 2026-09-10, next review September 2027.

1. Industrial decline since 1980, sectoral strengths and the level of public spending — OECD Economic Outlook 2026/1, France
2. Nuclear share of generation and net electricity exports — France & Europe 2026: Energy Transition
3. Deficit and debt path — European Commission, forecast for France