2023-06-19 23:04:00
Despite the pension reform, the forty existing schemes “would remain permanently in deficit”, according to the Pensions Orientation Council.
By VD with AFP The situation would however be worse without the pension reform, which will limit the number of retirees and therefore curb spending. (Illustrative photo). © BENOIT DURAND / Hans Lucas / Hans Lucas via AFP Published on 06/19/2023 at 11:04 p.m.
The reform adopted with forceps in April will not bring financial equilibrium back as promised in 2030, estimates the Pensions Orientation Council (COR), which on the contrary predicts a “sustainable” return to deficits from next year, according to a report consulted on Monday by Agence France-Presse. Missed objective. The pension reform, with the decline of the legal age from 62 to 64, was to reset the counters and the system to balance at the end of the decade. But that will not be enough: taken as a whole, the forty existing schemes “would remain permanently in deficit”, indicates the COR in its annual report which will be officially presented on Thursday.
After a post-Covid parenthesis marked by unusual surpluses (4.4 billion euros last year, another 3.6 billion expected this year), the relapse is announced from 2024 and would fluctuate until 2030 between 0.2 and 0.3 points of GDP (gross domestic product), or between 5 and 8 billion per year. Beyond that, the accounts would remain in the red in three of the four scenarios studied and would only return to green “after 2045” in the best case scenario.
Slow-moving recipes
However, the situation would be worse without the reform, which will limit the number of retirees and therefore curb spending. But revenues will also slow, mainly due to staffing and salary restrictions among civil servants – the last increase in the index point (1.5% in July) was not taken into account, however. This explains why the future deficits would come first from the system of territorial and hospital agents (CNRACL), which would experience “financing needs over the entire period and in all scenarios”.
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On the social security side, old-age insurance would remain in balance until the beginning of the 2030s, before plunging “continuously into three out of four scenarios”. Conversely, the large complementary fund for private sector employees (Agirc-Arrco) would remain well above the waterline “over the entire projection period”, provides the COR. A perpetual kitty subject to caution, because it will be the subject in the fall of a negotiation between unions and employers.
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