The Minister of Economy and Finance said on Saturday that he wanted to raise the employment rate from 68% today to 80% in France by the end of the five-year term, in 2027, a marked increase which would contribute to the improvement in public finances. “We must increase the country’s employment rate by 2027,” Bruno Le Maire told journalists on the sidelines of the Aix-en-Provence Economic Meetings. “We must aim for an 80% employment rate in the coming years,” he said, a rate that France has not known “for half a century”.
The employment rate relates the number of people in employment to the population of working age, and France is less well placed than other European countries in this area, such as Germany (78%) and the Netherlands (more than 80%), according to the minister. “If we had an employment rate equivalent to that of Germany, we would no longer have a deficit problem, our debt would be reduced much more quickly and we would generally no longer have a problem with public finances”, a- he pointed out.
To achieve this, the government is counting in particular on its reform which plans to gradually raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 years. It has also set itself the objective of achieving full employment by 2027, i.e. an unemployment rate of around 5% (compared to 7.1% of the active population in the first quarter of 2023) .
