/2025/03/04/bozio-67c73fa81406f384058548.png)
“Priority is to insert our young people as quickly as possible in the labor market“, insists, Tuesday March 4 Antoine Bozio, professor at Paris School of Economics and member of the Economic Analysis Council, a Cbetween reflection attached to Matignon. This is one of the objectives of Emmanuel Macron: achieving full employment by 2027. It is often explained that it means an unemployment rate below 5%. Antoine Bozio Co-public precisely a study devoted to this question, entitled “Objective ‘full employment’: why and how?”
Franceinfo: You say that it would be a reducing to talk about full employment by thinking only of the unemployment rate.
Antoine Bozio: In general, when you think about the full employment goal, you think the goal of lowering the unemployment rate. But unemployment measures people who are looking for a job, that is to say people who are already in an active position of job search. And so the full employment objective, in fact, is something wider, that is to say to promote participation in the labor market of all those who, in reality, wish to participate in the labor market, even if they are not looking for jobs. This is why it is wider and more important to think in wider terms of increased employment rate in the economy.
For this study, you compared the evolution of the labor market over 55 years in four countries: France, Germany, United Kingdom and the United States. You find that the French work 100 hours less on average than their European neighbors, between 200 and 300 less than the Americans. Double question: why and is it serious?
It is important to measure and to know what is the amount of work provided in a country, because there are lots of positive, tax externalities, as economists call them: the fact that when there are more people in employment, it is easier to finance social protection, to finance other public spending. So, it is important to know to what extent we have, or not, reservations in places where we could have an increase in the number of hours worked. We have 100 hours less per capita than the neighboring European countries, the United Kingdom and Germany. How is this difference? It is explained 100% by employment rates differentials, so it is not the number of hours per employment which is lower in France than in these countries. And 100% of these differences in employment rate, it is explained by young people and seniors.
Let’s start with the youngest. The real question at that time is their integration into the job market.
Absolutely. What we can see in this study is that there are several reasons. We tried to decompose how, why we end up with lower employment rates than our European neighbors. At any level of qualification, we take a longer time to fit into the labor market in France than in the United Kingdom and Germany, that is to say that we are less likely to be in employment already when we are at the end of studies and that we take more time to arrive on the job market. And we have a stronger percentage of young people who go out without training, unemployed, what is called with the Anglo-Saxon acronym the “neets”, that is to say who are neither in employment nor in training. And that is also a very important point, because the least qualified have even more difficult to enter the labor market.
There is a subject on low -skilled workers also in what you describe.
Yes, because they have not only a slower effect on integration when they are young, but in fact which has a lasting effect, that is to say that their employment rate, even 10 or 15 years after their end of the training system, is lower than the other French.
What about seniors?
For seniors, the news is actually a little better in the sense that when we had done a similar study about fifteen years ago, the employment rate of seniors was really particularly low in France compared to our neighboring countries. There was a very strong rise in the employment rate, for example between 55 and 59 years, which makes that today the employment rate of this age group is higher in France at the employment rate, for example, in the United Kingdom or the United States.
What has changed are pension reforms?
There are both pension reforms. It is especially for this age group, the end of the pre -retites. We put an end to devices that made it possible to start early. It mechanically increases the employment rate in this age group. Then then, what we see for a little older ages, between 60 and 64 years, is such a very strong increase that really follows pensions reforms and which will probably continue to increase, because reforms already voted have effects which will take place gradually in terms of increasing the employment rate.
There is a speech that we sometimes hear, seeing often in politics is: “You have to work more”. With the question of increases in the number of hours of work, the reduction of days off, what reading do you have about this speech?
Because when we think of the number of hours worked, we have this idea that it is necessarily the number of hours worked by employment, but we have an average of the hours worked which are very close to those of the average in the United Kingdom or in Germany. It is therefore a little bit an error of objective to think that this is where we will have the most effect in terms of increasing the mass of number of hours in our country. It is really the way of thinking about employment and integration into the young labor market and the way in which maintaining seniors in employment that should be the priority of public policies.
You have made your diagnosis, you say what does not seem to you to be the right solution, but then what should you do? If it was you, what would you do?
It is not so simple, because typically, it has been at least for 25 years that we have this observation of the great difficulty of integration of young people into the labor market. It is probably linked to the fact that we do not manage to see the right adequacy of our training system with the ease that young people have at the exit of the training system to be inserted on a job. And so, the first thing that seems obvious to me to do is already to be able to measure for all the sectors, for all the outings, what is really the level of integration, to give this information to young people so that, in their choice of orientation, they can move towards the formations which ultimately promote this insertion as quickly as possible.
France spends more than its neighbors in employment policy, training?
France spends relatively much for employment policies, but which are surely seen as policies precisely to combat unemployment, the integration of the unemployed. And perhaps there are other policies that are in fact educational policies, training policies which in reality can have a much more direct effect on the increase in the employment rate.
You also write in this study that the problem is undoubtedly not linked to the generosity of unemployment compensation in France.
When we look on the age group of 30-54 year olds, we have the same employment rate as the Americans, as the British, as the Germans. However, we have different unemployment rates that are higher in France than in these countries. But, therefore, that does not mean that when we play on unemployment compensation or on mechanisms, we only play on this tranche of the unemployed who are looking for a job. And we don’t necessarily play on other margins that allow people who have come out of job search in the job market.
If you summarize, your number one recommendation, what is it?
My number one recommendation would really be to rethink priority. Priority is to make sure to insert our young people as quickly as possible on the job market.
With this new perimeter, is it possible to reach the full employment objective by 2027?
It’s probably much easier to think about this in this way. Because if we increase the employment rate, for example for seniors and for the youngest, we will mechanically increase the mass likely to be in employment, and therefore mechanically, we will have a drop in the drop in the unemployment rate. But it is a way of rethinking the priorities that public decision -makers must take into account.
