“Are there too many civil servants in France? »
Are there too many civil servants in France? What about it? The Pilgrim deciphers the subject for you.
- Stuck in a public deficit of 5.5% of GDP, the French state is looking for savings. In its draft budget for 2025, Michel Barnier’s government plans to eliminate 2,200 civil servant positions and indicated that retirements would not be systematically replaced. A timid break with several years of constant increase in numbers.
- In 2022, the public service employed 5,694,000 people, or 20.1% of the total employed population. In France, one in five workers is an employee of the public sector, whether they are a “civil servant”, in other words holding the general civil service status, contractual or military. Public administration is divided into three categories: state agents (police officers, teachers, notaries, etc.), those of local authorities (garbage collectors, gardeners, school cooks, etc.) and employees of the public hospital service. In Europe, France is far from having the most public officials in proportion to total employment. The leaders in this area are the Scandinavian countries: in Norway, almost one employee in three (31%) works in the public sector, in Sweden 29%, in Denmark 28%.
- But over the past twenty-five years, France has hired 1,050,000 additional civil servants, an increase of 23% in the workforce. And over the same period, the French population increased by only 14% and the number of private sector workers by 18%. Local authorities found themselves the best off, with an increase of 46%, while the workforce of public health, social and medico-social establishments increased by 36% and those of state agents by 7%. To stem the budgetary slippage of municipalities, departments and regions, the Court of Auditors suggests reducing their workforce by 5%, or 100,000 local agent positions.
- In conclusion, the question concerns less the number of civil servants than their distribution and their usefulness in the different sectors. This brings us to the debate concerning the effectiveness of the public service. According to the annual overview of the International Monetary Fund, health, education and justice services in France, in terms of accessibility, responsiveness and quality, rank among the average of developed countries (OECD, 2023).
