LFrance is no longer the good student of productivity: in the third quarter of 2023, it was 3.9% lower than its level at the end of 2019. The situation is particularly alarming in the manufacturing industry, with productivity in falling 6.9% since the end of 2019, while it was up 5.6% in the eurozone.
The National Productivity Council, the French Observatory of Economic Conditions and the direction of animation of research, studies and statistics highlight several explanatory factors: the increase in apprenticeship, the drop in average working time per employee, as well as certain aid and subsidies to keep poorly productive businesses alive, which, without them, would have gone bankrupt.
But these short-term factors should not cause us to lose sight of a longer-term problem. For around twenty years, productivity has slowed down in France compared to dynamic economies like Germany or the United States. So much so that since 2009 we have been less productive per hour worked than these two countries. This relative decline affects all sectors and types of business, and constitutes an annual shortfall of around 5.8 points of gross domestic product (GDP), or 160 billion euros.
These findings call into question the traditional diagnosis of French economic decline, according to which the number of hours worked is the main problem of the French economy, due to the unemployment rate, weekly working time or retirement age. retired. In fact, an increase in our employment rate at the level of Germany would represent an increase in GDP of around 5%, the equivalent of the relative decline in productivity since the 2000s.
Fall of vocations
So, what to do? Education and academic and professional guidance appear to be the main keys. Accelerating productivity relies on a more rapid diffusion of innovations, which requires skills that we now lack due to French school dropouts over the past thirty years. Visible in all national and international studies, this dropout leads our students to be the penultimate in the countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in mathematics in class 4ejust ahead of Chile.
A dropout which also affects the best students. It therefore affects not only the capacity for adoption of innovations by the greatest number of people, but also our capacity to train scientists, entrepreneurs and engineers to master the technologies of tomorrow. The drop in level is coupled with a drop in vocations for science and research, as evidenced by the decrease in the number of doctoral students in science since 2009. The 2022-2023 academic year thus saw a 10% drop in the number of doctoral students registered in mathematics compared to the previous year.
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