There’s trouble in start-up nation paradise. Against all expectations, it was the employers who recently stepped in. In the home stretch of the negotiation between social partners on the new unemployment insurance rules, Medef and CPME have played an unexpected card to balance the books: tightening the screws on support systems for the creation of business. In the sights of employers’ organizations, two aid systems – Arce and ARE – whose objective is to help job seekers create or take over a business. A proposal immediately taken up by the employee unions. The reason given to justify this turn of the screw: too much abuse and a glaring lack of control in the actual use of funds. Unemployed people, transformed for a time into business creators, would benefit from the generosity of the system by retaining their aid even when they had found a job. The subject had been on the table at Pôle emploi for months but, until then, nothing had been decided.
According to a recent note from Unedic, these two aids represent nearly 2.8 billion euros paid each year into unemployment insurance funds. According to our information, strengthening controls would make it possible to achieve savings of 70 million euros from next year, and nearly 870 million over the period 2024-2027.
If verification of the proper use of public funds is justified, especially in this period of budgetary scarcity, the signal sent is questionable. Because if the system of aid for business creation is generous, it also bears fruit. At the very moment when the social partners were calling it quits, France Stratégie, a research institute attached to Matignon, published a study revealing France’s outperformance in business creation. Between 2015 and 2022, the number of new shoots doubled, compared to a multiple of only 1.2, on average, in the euro zone. Against all expectations, it is not in personal services or catering that the entrepreneurial dynamic has been strongest, but in industry. The cost of finding factories in France?