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Thursday, June 6, 2013

France Needs a “Power-Up” When It Comes to Labor Reform

by Matthew Melchiorre on June 5, 2013
In its annual country report released on Monday, the IMF turned up the heat on France for labor reform. The Washington-based lender called for a “powering up” of Hollande’s labor reforms to tackle the “significant rigidities hinder[ing] the economy’s capacity to grow and create jobs.”
Socialist President Francois Hollande, who has suffered since inauguration the largest fall in popularity of any French President in the past 50 years, has already been under considerable pressure from a citizenry fatigued from anemic and oftentimes negative economic growth and rising unemployment since 2008. Yet he still hasn’t delivered on reviving France’s flailing job market.
That’s because he’s too focused on devising government schemes, such as giving subsidies to small businesses who hire young people and retain older workers, to avoid making real changes to business-crushing labor regulations that have come to be entitlements within French society. Hollande’s changes to these laws thus far, in an attempt to draw attention away from his inaction on structural reform, are merely cosmetic, as I point out in a February CS Monitor article….To Read More…..

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