Distribution of our 2022 report on employment and investment in France

On March 2, we are releasing our analysis of employment and investment in France to our clients and subscribers. In his economic editorial on France Inter two days before, Dominique SEUX quoted Trendeo to compare the strong communication on foreign investment with that on domestic investment.

In fact, in the report published on March 2, a breakdown is provided for each region, showing the share of regional investment, French investment outside the region, and foreign investment(spoiler : the two extreme breakdowns are Île-de-France and Grand Est).

A few thoughts on the point raised in Dominique Seux's editorial.

First of all, it's good that Business France is presenting a report on foreign investment in France, and logical that the government should welcome the increase. But the editorial deplored the lack of equivalent communication on domestic investment.

Foreign investment, on average, represents 20% of all jobs created in the data we collect. "That leaves around 80% for domestic investment. As Olivier Bouba-Olga's recent analyses and maps show, many of these jobs come from diffuse micro-creations, local jobs, to which few "visible" analyses are devoted. This scattering may be one of the reasons why domestic investment is less visible. There are many other explanations, but the important thing is to value domestic investment as much as foreign investment.

Enhancing the value of domestic, exogenous investment; "domestic attractiveness".

To ensure that these "endogenous" economic development issues are better taken into account - what Dominique SEUX calls "domestic attractiveness" - we would like to see local economic development agencies, which are still often only responsible for foreign investment, see their remit extended to economic development in general, in conjunction with innovation and urban planning agencies (on the other hand, it seems to us that the existence of a national agency dedicated to this theme is not a luxury, as there are specific needs for foreign companies).

Encouraging regional investment in their regional champions also seems to us likely to increase the attention paid to the day-to-day problems encountered by the fabric of SMEs and ETIs which, in France, lack clout when compared with the German mittelstand . We know that the Lower Saxony Land's shareholding in Volkswagen has, over time, encouraged the group's local roots.

What this editorial also underlines is the importance of a concrete approach to the economy, between the micro and the macro, which takes into account the diversity of territorial and sectoral situations. This concrete approach is the main advantage of our French and international data!