France was hit harder by the Covid-19 pandemic than many of its euro area peers, as gross domestic product contracted by 8.2% in 2020. The effect of these difficulties was to squeeze the size of the economy as a whole to more than 5% below its pre-pandemic level.
Despite these challenges, swift and extensive support by the French government has prevented the kind of deep economic scarring that initially concerned analysts and observers. Private employment, for example, experienced only a 1.8% drop in 2020, much less than originally feared, while household wealth was also broadly preserved.
