French ministries' pension costs crowd out public services spending, report says

Pensions account for 32% of French education spending 30% of interior ministry's budget is pensions PARIS, Oct 13 (Reuters) — Nearly a third of some French ministries' budgets pay for the pensions of retired civil servants, squeezing out spending on other priorities such as education, a government report said. The report, a 250-page annex to the finance bill, is the first to break down retirement costs for each ministry and comes amid growing political attention towards the cost of France's rising pensions bill. It shows that 32% of the education ministry’s appropriations, or €28.5 billion ($32 billion), ends up with the special pension account that funds state civil servants' pensions. The share for the interior ministry, which employs national police officers in France, is 30%. Across all ministries, the average is about 13%. The report, which said overall pension spending has risen by 2.5 percentage points of GDP between 2000 and 2023 while that for education has declined 0.5, follows street protests by high school students protesting poor conditions in classrooms. "The burden of pension expenditure within ministerial budgets thus has a crowding-out effect: in each ministry, the