France: Selected Issues

The Selected Issues paper on France identifies areas where scope for savings or efficiency gains exist based on an analysis of public spending on key categories and related outcomes relative to peers. Reform of social protection, health, education, and civil service should preserve or improve outcomes while generating savings that would help meet medium-term adjustment needs. In parallel, rationalizing costly, distortive, or inefficient tax expenditures would allow for base broadening and partially offset permanent revenue losses from the rebalancing of revenues away from labor and production taxes. Social protection spending accounts for more than half of the spending gap with peers. Achieving more efficiency in local public administration will be critical to ensure the benefits of decentralization in France. Adequate subnational capacity and transparent multilevel governance, including efficient co-ordination mechanisms across levels of government is important to promote efficient public service delivery and regional development. Rationalizing and redesigning tax expenditures would improve their efficiency and generate substantial savings.