There will be no real improvement for struggling economies - France and Italy in particular - without an improvement in skills

We look at the examples of France and Italy, which suffer from low employment rates (and therefore high structural unemployment, capacity constraints on the supply side, public finance problems), deindustrialisation (and therefore a declining quality of jobs, foreign trade problems) and weak productivity gains (and therefore weak growth in purchasing power, declining competitiveness and market shares, profitability and investment). We think that these problems will only be able to be corrected if there is an improvement in labour force skills in these countries, so clear is the link between skills, the employment rate, productivity and corporate modernisation.