Major boost for business set-up

Business set-up increased in all sectors, especially among micro-entreprises, which are up 24.8%, but also among traditional sole trader businesses (19.3%) and to a lesser extent, companies (2.4%).

The year-on-year rise was especially marked over the last quarter at 21.2%.

The sectors with the largest amounts of business creation were transport and storage, followed by property-related businesses. There were a particularly high number of set-ups for home-delivery, including people working for schemes like Deliveroo, UberEats and Foodora.

The boost in the micro-entreprise sector has been hailed as a welcome development – it took off strongly after the auto-entrepreneur was launched 10 years ago but had more recently been running out of steam. President of the Union des Auto-entrepreneurs, François Hurel, has called it “spectacular and a very good sign for the economy”. Recent trends include more women setting up businesses, and higher average turnovers.

The rise has been linked to measures such as a first year of exoneration from social charges (with a limit of €30,000 turnover) and the doubling of the ceilings for the simple micro-entreprise set-up.

Also in the pipeline is the Pacte Law, to be debated by MPs in the autumn.

It includes a ‘one-stop shop’ way to make the declarations required in creating a company (société), removing the obligation for micro-entrepreneurs in artisan sectors to do a set-up course, and removing for firms with small turnovers, the requirement to have a separate bank account.