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 lowering of the legal age from 62 to 64, was to reset the counters to zero and the system to balance at the end of the decade. But that will not be enough: taken as a whole, the forty existing plans “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 the green “after 2045” in the best case.
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 index point increase (1.5% in July) was not taken into account, however. This explains why the future deficits would come first from the territorial and hospital agents scheme (CNRACL), which would experience “financing needs over the entire period and in all scenarios”.
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”, predicts the COR. A perpetual kitty subject to caution, because it will be the subject in the fall of a negotiation between unions and employers.