France: The purchasing power issue is hard to grasp from an economic viewpoint

There is a growing consensus in France around the issue of purchasing power: many French people face obvious difficulties living decently, due to low wages and high costs (housing, transport, energy, insurance, etc.).But economic arithmetic shows that this issue will be difficult to resolve: The level of labour productivity is high in France (we compare France with Germany and with the euro zone as a whole); The wage share of national income is high in France; The minimum wage is high relative to the median wage; Income inequality after redistribution is low and has not risen; France has large -scale redistributive policies. So t here is no obvious answer in France (which is not the case in other countries, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Japan, etc.) to the purchasing power problem: there is no prospect for productivity catch-up, wages have not lagged behind productivity, the relative level of the minimum wage can hardly be increased, inequality is not very high (relative to other countries), the size of redistributive policies can hardly be increased, etc. The issue of purchasing power is not straightforward in France.