PARIS, April 22 (Reuters) – Uncertain economic conditions and possible changes in interest rates could throw France’s effort to trim its deficit \u200cto 3% of output by 2029 into doubt, France’s fiscal \u200cwatchdog said on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
The conflict in the Middle East has scrambled the outlook for \u200bFrance and the broader euro zone, as oil and gas costs have surged.<\/p>\n
Last week France’s finance ministry cut its 2026 growth forecast slightly to reflect the fallout from the conflict, predicting the euro zone’s second-largest economy would \u200cgrow 0.9% instead of \u2060the 1% it had previously expected, and raised its inflation estimate to an average 1.9% from 1.3%.<\/p>\n
And in March, \u2060overall inflation in the 21 countries sharing the euro currency jumped to 2.5% from 1.9% a month earlier, though the hike was smaller than expected \u200band core \u200binflation declined.<\/p>\n
The European Central Bank is \u200bweighing a rise in interest \u200crates to prevent the surge in energy costs from becoming entrenched in the prices of other goods and services.<\/p>\n
In France, the High Council for the Public Finances, which is mandated by law to examine the government’s budget plans, said in a report that plans to cut public \u200cspending may not be enough to reduce \u200bthe deficit due to other uncertainties.<\/p>\n
“Even if \u200bthe net primary spending trajectory \u200bis maintained, the actual reduction of the deficit to \u200cbelow 3% of GDP by 2029 \u200bis subject to \u200buncertainties, particularly regarding economic conditions, interest rate trends, and the response of revenues to growth,” it said.<\/p>\n
France, which has one of the \u200blargest budget deficits in \u200cthe euro zone, has said it will offset the economic \u200bfallout from the Iran crisis by freezing some spending.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by \u200bMakini Brice; Editing by Toby Chopra)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PARIS, April 22 (Reuters) – Uncertain economic conditions and possible changes in interest rates could throw France’s effort…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8231,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[6645,6650,6648,6647,6649,5,6646],"class_list":{"0":"post-8230","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-france","8":"tag-conflict-in-the-middle-east","9":"tag-deficit","10":"tag-economic-conditions","11":"tag-euro-zone","12":"tag-fiscal-watchdog","13":"tag-france","14":"tag-interest-rates"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8230\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}