Paris: French Finance Minister Michel Sapin said Monday he was confident his country can ride out global growth concerns and hit Paris' target of a 1.5 percent rise in 2016.
"France is less concerned by the global slowdown" than many other countries, as it is coming off a low starting base, he told reporters on his return a meeting of G20 finance ministers in Shanghai.
In November, Sapin said he believed France had "exited the period of extremely weak growth" which had long bedevilled the eurozone's second largest economy.
Concerns over the health of the global economy "do not call into question" the official growth target, he said.
In Shanghai, the world's 20 top economies pledged to use all policy tools available to lift sluggish global growth and dispel uncertainty amid falling markets and a disconnect on interest rates policy following the first US rise in nine years -- while Japan has adopted negative rates.
Sapin said France could point to factors such as domestic demand and investment underpinning growth at home.
Therefore "we think our growth target is perfectly in line with reality," he insisted, despite international institutions recently paring back their French forecasts citing a worrisome global backdrop
The OECD forecast is for 1.2 percent French growth while the European Commission and the IMF estimate is 1.3 percent.
AFP
