We can make use of liquidity they can throw in the market! It is too late to save the old model.
French state social spending is 54.7% of GDP, compared with 44% in Britain. Too many people, filling in too much paper, enforcing too many rules and extracting too many taxes; the system is unsustainably piling up debt for future generations.
A heavy price is paid in job creation, too. High non-wage employment costs, coupled with tight redundancy rules, mean that companies make do with small payrolls. If hotels and restaurants employed proportionately as many people in France as they do in America, says the Camdessus report, the country would create 3.2m extra jobs overnight—albeit the sort of low-paid “McJobs” at which French governments tend to sneer. Over-protection of permanent jobs has prompted employers to recruit increasingly on precarious short-term contracts: these now account for over three-quarters of new jobs created. This two-tier job market particularly traps the young and low-skilled."
French socialism, to protect the domestic population from capitalism, Anglo-Saxon style, instead is producing a country with high unemployment, chronically around 10%. In the same Economist article above, the results of these policies are compared versus the Anglo-Saxon model:
"For 20 years, France's unemployment rate has been stuck between 8% and 10%. The young and the (not so) old are largely shut out of work. The employment rate among under-25s is now just 24%, where the OECD average is 44%, but that of 55-64-year-olds is 34%, compared with 50% in other OECD countries."
Inverting the number of employed above leaves a stunning 76% of French youth unemployed!
"Between 1980 and 2003, the total number of hours worked in America jumped by 39%, and in Britain by 8%; in France, it fell by 6%. This by itself almost entirely explains the differing economic growth rates over the same period in these three countries." |
