- Patrick Artus’ response
France has a particularly degraded situation with regard to labor productivity: it continues to progress at a rate close to 2 % per year in the United States, it has been stagnating in the euro zone since 2017 and it fell in France by 2.4 % since 2019.
A decline in productivity implies a weakness of the progression of real wages and profits, low tax revenue and a difficulty in reducing public deficits; It is therefore important to identify the causes of this decline in labor productivity in France.
Cyclical factors. We can identify two cyclical factors, short -term, which could have a favorable effect, also in the short term, on labor productivity in France. It is first of all the sharp reduction in learning aid (aid goes from 8,000 euros, then 6000 euros per apprentice at 5000 euros for companies with less than 250 employees and 2000 euros for other companies). This clear reduction in aid will lower the number of apprentices in France (1,043,000 at the end of 2024) which will advance productivity, at least in the short term, since, unfortunately, the reduction in the number of apprentices will slow down long -term productivity.
It is then the fact that many companies have been kept artificially in life since 2020 by public aid, when they should have disappeared: the rise in the number of business failures since 2023 (27,600 failures in 2021, 41,300 in 2022, 56,000 in 2023, 65,000 in 2024 and 17,800 in the first quarter of 2025) will normally make it disappear from the unproductive companies, a recovery of productivity.
Structural factors. But many structural factors depress productivity in France. This is the increase in absenteeism rate (from 3.8 % in 2011 to 5 % in 2018 and 6.1 % in 2023); of the weakness of the skills of the active population, shown by the PIAAC survey of the OECD (where the scoring of France is much lower than that of the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, Japan …) and the low quality of the education system shown by the PISA survey of the OECD (in the 2022 survey, France has a lower score, United Kingdom, much lower than Finland, Canada or Japan); low weight of the industry (which weighs 9 % of GDP in France against 14 % in Italy and Sweden, 18 % in Germany, 22 % in Japan) and the information and communication technology sector (4.2 % of GDP in France, 4.8 % of GDP in Germany, 7.1 % of GDP in the United States); Insufficient robotization (there are 186 robots for 10,000 employees in France against 228 in Italy, 295 in the United States, 302 in Switzerland, 347 in Sweden, 419 in Japan, 429 in Germany, 470 in China, 1012 in South Korea), finally the high protection of employment which prevents the rotation of unproductive companies to more productive companies.
As long as these structural causes are not corrected, which will be difficult and long, you should not expect to recovery of labor productivity.
To read also:
Productivity: France broken down – by Frédéric Gonand
To go further, register at the conference Capital, labor and progress: why productivity slows down? -which will bring together Jean-Pierre Clamadieu, Esther Duflo, Pierre-Olivier Gourchas, Florent Ménégaux and Patrick Artus during the Economic meetings of Aix en Provence 2025.
