| I understand your point. I mixed background, long term tendancies with on-the-field daily feelings. I should have more emphasized on the long-term tendancy : almost all lights are now red in France (and not so better in the UK) : - Educational system is in shambles. Not enough manpower, not enough funds, too many kids per classroom. Level is steadily dropping. France's PISA ranking is getting worse and worse. - Health system is on his knees, and the decision to fire (without pay) the unvaccinated health staff put a additional strain upon it. Thousands of them left for Quebec. - National debt is higher than ever. - A great portion of the French GDP is in fact born from the pensions spendings (legal age for retirement was 62 till now, and 26% of the total population is 60 yo and more) and public workforce (12,4% of total GDP, very similar to northern europe). - We lost most of our nuclear workforce and engineering because the plan was to phase out nuke power plants for renewables... until two years ago. I Have a part of my relatives directly involved in nuclear power production field, now retired and they lament the loss of the once respected french "expertise" (well, mainly bought from Westinghouse but cough). - Big compagnies still perform well (especially luxury companies - thanks China), but the other industrial ones are outsourcing/offshoring production at an alarming rate (the plan was to relocate and reindustrialize, but this was also before the energy crisis). Not much hope here. Consequently, spendings being high, labour costs are also high (too much, if you ask me). Even if 26% are 60 yo or more, we still "benefit" from a quite high immigration, but we aren't quite able anymore to make the better of it because of the failing public education system. Forecast are not particulary good, hence the pressure from the EU commission to reform the French pension system and target 65 or 64 yo as legal retirement age. In fact, very similar to the UK, with more socialism ? For the "young ones" (I'm 40), I fear that they won't be able to acquire the skills they need if they don't have the basic knowledge (numeracy and literacy foremost) and softskills layer they are currently losing. |