Four obstacles to a recovery plan in France

A recovery plan in France faces four obstacles that may render it ineffective. France is far from attractive for investment (low skills, high production costs and corporate taxes). It needs a real, large-scale attractiveness shock. The difficulty is not imagining the industries needed for the future, but setting up cooperation between companies and the government so that the necessary research and investment is carried out (based on the DARPA model in the United States). The upheaval of the sectoral structure of the economy is leading to a considerable need to retrain and reskill, which also applies to young people. If this need is not met, the recovery plan will not stop structural unemployment from rising . The risk of giving rise to listless zombie firms if corporate debt is not sufficiently converted into equity, if companies without a future are propped up, if jobs are preserved that will eventually be lost and, more generally , if the government fails to switch from supporting jobs to supporting people (income preservation during retraining).