France, adaptability
France's long-term unemployment decline
France's national statistics office Insee reported that people unemployed for at least one year represented 23.3% of all unemployed people in 2024, while the long-term unemployment rate was 1.7% of the active population, down from 3.1% in 2015.
23.3 % of unemployed, long-term unemployed as share of all unemployed, 2024. 1.7 % of active population, long-term unemployment rate, 2024. Insee, Evolution du chômage / Employment Survey 2024, retrieved 2026-08-31.
The move, and what it needed
France's employment system combines unemployment insurance, employment-service counselling and targeted training or hiring support, helping some jobseekers move through the labour market before unemployment becomes persistent. The falling long-term rate is an outcome to investigate, not proof that one programme caused it.
Preconditions
- A labour-force survey and employment-service records that distinguish duration consistently
- Income support and active labour-market services that preserve contact with jobseekers while they search
- Employers, training providers and regional intermediaries able to convert counselling into credible vacancies or skill transitions
Where else it has been used: Long-term-unemployment reductions travel when income support, matching and skills services are connected to real employer demand; a falling rate can otherwise reflect exits from the labour force rather than successful re-employment.
Limits: The figures describe labour-market duration, not the causes of unemployment, the quality of re-employment or whether training and employment services produced the decline. Insee's household-survey definitions and population scope matter, and a low long-term share can coexist with high short-term churn or discouraged workers outside the unemployment measure.
This record describes what France delivered. It is linked to Long-term unemployment share because no comparable dataset measures that capability. It does not affect the score or confidence.
More from France
9 other deliveries from this country.
Flamanville 3 EPR, and the erosion of nuclear new-build delivery
France's Flamanville 3 EPR took about 16.5 years from construction beginning in September 2007 to completion in early 2024, and its commissioning was the country's first new nuclear reactor since Civaux 2 in 1999, a 25-year gap.
France's Compte personnel de formation generated 1,387,500 training starts in 2024, with 1,232,100 people entering a CPF-funded course through the national account and platform.
Strategic stock of pandemic masks, and its erosion
France's health ministry and its stockpile agency built a strategic pandemic stock of about 1.7 billion FFP2 and surgical masks by 2009, but by the start of the covid-19 crisis it held only about 100 million valid masks, according to the Senate commission of inquiry.
The Société du Grand Paris, the state's public builder, renamed Société des grands projets by the law of 27 December 2023, has been building the Grand Paris Express automatic metro since works began in June 2016. The project's estimated total cost rose from 22.6 billion euros in March 2013 to 36.1 billion euros from October 2021, about 60 percent above the 2013 estimate.
Under the Plan France Très Haut Débit, defined by the government in February 2013, private operators and local-authority public initiative networks built fibre so that 43.1 million of France's 45.2 million premises, 95.3 percent, were connectable to fibre at the end of June 2026.
France's research ministry has funded Cifre industrial doctorates since 1981, paying an employer 42,000 euros over three years to hire a doctoral candidate whose thesis research is run in partnership with an academic laboratory; ANRT, which operates the scheme for the ministry, accepted 1,700 new Cifre in 2025 across 1,029 distinct employers.
Senate foresight delegation (Délégation sénatoriale à la prospective)
The Bureau of the French Senate created a foresight delegation in April 2009, succeeding the planning delegation set up by the 1982 planning reform law, with a mandate to study changes in society and the economy and to build scenarios; it has 36 senators appointed in proportion to the political groups and adopted reports in every year from 2010 to 2022 listed on its page.
Bac à sable réglementaire in the energy sector
Under the 2019 energy and climate law, France's energy regulator CRE and the energy directorate DGEC granted temporary derogations from network access rules to 30 projects, 25 by CRE and 5 by DGEC, of which six were running and reporting indicators in May 2025 and two had been generalised into regulation in 2024.
Activité partielle in the 2020 crisis
France scaled its short-time work scheme (activité partielle) from an industrial instrument into an economy-wide one in the spring of 2020, placing 8.4 million employees on it at the April 2020 peak and 11.3 million at some point between March 2020 and December 2021.