I’m going to deal with the unemployment rate in a separate post. Very short preview: it is higher in France, but the gap is exaggerated. There is a problem integrating the less-skilled into the economy.
Nomad — nice link. Here’s another.
Mike P — depends on how you define living standards. If it’s just GDP, we’re back to the problem I talk about — the trade-off between money income and leisure.
Bryan — France’s productivity is broadly shared thru their Big Gov.
Dell — If you check the tables under my OECD link, you’ll see that the growth rates of productivity for a number of Euro countries are much higher since 1970 (as far back as the tables go). The numbers even surprised me. It could be because they started lower, since they had to rebuild after WWII. Whatever the reason, it’s quite possible they could continue. At this point, you can hardly call them laggards.
