PARIS, Sept 2 (Reuters) – This summer’s successive heatwaves could shave 0.1 percentage points off French economic growth on average this year, the Finance Ministry said on Wednesday.
The ministry, however, stressed this was just a mere estimate at this stage and not an official update of its forecast for French growth, which currently stands at 0.7% for 2026.
• Last week, the INSEE statistics agency revised growth for the second quarter of 2026 from 0.2% in an initial reading down to 0.0%, after the euro zone’s second-biggest economy contracted by 0.2% in the first quarter.
• Finance Minister Roland Lescure said last week that the INSEE downgrade “is the first impact of the horrible summer that we had.”
• The INSEE downgrade puts the government’s full-year growth forecast of 0.7% all but out of reach as the economy would need to grow 0.5% in both the third and fourth quarters to reach it, according to INSEE.
• Lescure told an economics conference last week that his ministry would need to factor in a likely weak third quarter when it updated France’s growth and deficit forecasts in September before presenting the 2027 budget bill in early October.
• One of the most severe heatwaves which occurred over the
summer in France was in the Bordeaux area, while a major
wildfire also hit the Fontainebleau forest near Paris in
July.
(Reporting by Dominique Vidalon;Editing by Sudip Kar-Gupta)
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