Club Finance with Francis Kramarz

Unemployment: have we really tried everything?

ATTENTION: CHANGE OF VENUE AND DAY!

Exceptionally, this breakfast meeting will take place on a Wednesday

and in another Ladurée boutique, 16 rue ROYALE, 75008 PARIS, métro Madeleine or Concorde.

At a time when most politicians seem to be relying on endless subsidized employment measures in the non-market sector, as well as on an elusive return to job-creating growth, it's time to think again.As François Mitterrand put it in 1993, "everything has been tried when it comes to unemployment"?

How can we understand the specific features of the French labor market? How does it differ from its European neighbors, or from the Nordic or Anglo-Saxon models? Should we see in the French particularism an inadequacy of market regulation mechanisms (wage flexibility, job-creating destruction mechanisms...), an excess of labor costs, or a lack of flexibility?), excessive labor costs, or a specific inability to respond to structural shocks (appreciation of the real exchange rate, lack of adaptation and innovation...)....), a fear of the unknown which leads to a preference for defending the jobs of the past and preventing the creation of those of tomorrow? Is the low employment rate linked to a specific flaw in the functioning of the French labor market, or to much broader blocking factors? or to much broader blocking factors, linked to an economy structured for the most part by a web of rents and statuses, and therefore hostile to market-based competition?

How should we interpret the recent agreement between the social partners: real progress or minimal reform? How should we respond to the criticisms of the Nordic or German models, which point to accelerated casualization and a rise in wage and salary inequalities?What can we say to the critics of the Nordic and German models, who argue that the labor market reforms of the 2000s have led to accelerated job insecurity and growing inequalities in pay and status? What can we still hope for, what can we still try?

Francis Kramarz, Inspector General of INSEE, is an economist specializing in employment and labor market issues. Professor at École Polytechnique and ENSAE, he is also Director of the Centre de recherche en économie et statistique (CREST).

A graduate of École Polytechnique (class of 1976) and École Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Économique (ENSAE, class of 1981), he holds a doctorate in economics from Université Paris-X Nanterre, obtained in 1994. He is a member of the Conseil d'orientation pour l'emploi, created in 2005 by Jean-Pierre Raffarin, and has been a member of the Groupe d'experts sur le SMIC since 2009.