Each record describes something a country built that the indicators do not capture. The source provides the published number; the mechanism is our interpretation.
Scores describe outcomes. These records describe how a country acted, what it needed and what happened. 742 of 742 records include a mechanism. They do not affect scores.
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.
A chamber's governing bureau turned an existing planning delegation into a standing foresight body of members with free choice of topics and a duty to write scenarios, which keeps it outside the legislative calendar.
Preconditions
An earlier planning delegation whose seat and staff could be repurposed
A chamber with longer terms and partial renewal, which suits long-horizon work
Freedom from bill work, which lets members choose topics without committee pressure
Where else it has been used: The page names Finland's and Lithuania's committees for the future as the only European parliamentary equivalents; the French version is a delegation of senators served by Senate staff rather than a research institute.
Limits: Membership measures size, not influence: 36 senators on a delegation say nothing about whether a report changed a law, and the delegation has no legislative power by design. It informs the Senate only; the National Assembly has no equivalent, as the page itself says, and the figure says nothing about foresight in the executive. The page's report list stops at 2022, although the delegation's main page shows a report dated June 2026, so the list is incomplete and no report count is given here. After the 2026 Senate renewal the main page states the delegations will be reconstituted, so the current membership is pending. It is filed against the foresight construct because its rules instruct it to draw up scenarios of change, which is foresight practice rather than technology assessment (France's technology assessment office, OPECST, is a separate body).
Under the Plan France Trรจs Haut Dรฉbit, 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.
The state split the territory: private operators made binding rollout commitments in profitable areas, which Arcep can enforce. In the rest, dรฉpartements and regions tendered public initiative networks, built and run by private firms under concession and co-financed by a state subsidy fund.
Preconditions
A regulator able to turn operators' voluntary rollout commitments into enforceable obligations
Local authorities with the scale and borrowing capacity to tender dรฉpartement-wide networks, backed by a national subsidy window
Wholesale open-access rules so that networks built with public money carry every retail operator
Where else it has been used: Other European countries used gap-funding models under EU state-aid rules. The French design differs in giving the regulator enforcement power over private commitments, which is why the private zones could be left to the market without being abandoned.
Limits: The national coverage figure mixes the parts of the plan. In the very dense zones and the private-initiative zones (AMII and AMEL), private operators invested on their own account, so not every connectable premise is a product of joint delivery. Only the public initiative network zones are the clearly public-private part. Arcep's release gives what remains to be built there, 5 percent, but not the zone's total size. 'Connectable' means a line passes the premises, not that anyone subscribes or that the service is good. The 20 billion euro envelope and the roughly 3 billion euro state subsidy are 2013 announcements, not audited spending. The envelope was announced for the ten years from 2013, and 2.1 million premises were still not connectable in mid-2026. Arcep says more than a third of those are premises where a third party refused the works or the building is still under construction. The deployment figures are reported by operators to the regulator.
๐ซ๐ทFrancesince 1981still operatingbears on University-industry collaboration
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.
The state subsidises a firm to employ a doctoral candidate whose thesis is supervised by an academic laboratory, and requires a collaboration contract between employer and lab, so each grant creates a person who works in both and a formal research agreement between them.
Preconditions
Doctoral schools willing to supervise theses whose questions come from employers
A research tax credit that covers much of the employer's remaining cost
A trusted intermediary that vets proposals and contracts quickly
Where else it has been used: Denmark's Industrial PhD, Spain's Doctorados Industriales and Poland's Doktorat wdroลผeniowy follow the same idea. The French scheme's scale comes from four decades of continuity and its interaction with the research tax credit.
Limits: The figures are inside a PDF (PDF pages 17 and 19, printed pages 15 and 17). ANRT is an association that runs the scheme on the ministry's behalf, so this is the programme reporting on itself; the ministry's own page was not reachable to cross-check. Employers include local authorities and associations (13 percent in 2025) as well as firms, so not every contract is university-industry collaboration. The count is of new contracts, not completed theses or research outputs. 2025 was below the scheme's own target: the same report says the ministry expected growth from 1,850 to 1,950 new Cifre and that 1,700 fell 13 percent short, with large firms' demand down 19 percent, so the 2025 figure is a dip against the 2024 level rather than a peak.
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.
France gave individuals a portable training entitlement, then put the account, catalogue, identity checks and payment flow into one national platform managed by the Caisse des Dรฉpรดts. The design lets workers choose a course while public employment services and employers can add targeted funding.
Preconditions
A national entitlement and contribution system that records rights across employers and employment spells
A trusted digital identity, provider catalogue and payment system that can verify courses and prevent fraud
Quality assurance and co-funding rules that keep a large open marketplace from becoming a directory of low-value training
Where else it has been used: Individual learning accounts travel when entitlement portability is paired with provider quality controls and guidance; a wallet without trusted course information can increase transactions without increasing skills.
Limits: Training starts and participant counts show use of a public financing and matching platform, not course completion, learning quality, job mobility, wage gains or equal access. DARES notes major catalogue and contribution-rule changes during 2024, including the motorcycle-licence expansion and a โฌ100 co-payment, so year-on-year totals are not a pure measure of underlying learning demand.
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.
Parliament gave the energy regulator and the ministry a power to grant time-limited derogations from network access conditions, first through application windows and since November 2022 on a rolling basis, with annual public progress reports.
Preconditions
A statutory derogation power covering named titles of the energy code
An independent regulator able to assess projects and publish follow-up
Network operators willing to host and measure non-standard arrangements
Where else it has been used: Two experiments (Enedis Reflex and an EDF project) were generalised by regulation in 2024, the route from sandbox to rule that many sandboxes lack.
Limits: The figure is inside a PDF (page 3). A derogation granted is not a trial run: the same report says only six of the 30 were in progress and producing indicators, and 14 further requests were awaiting a decision, mostly at DGEC. Progress data come from project holders and network operators. The sandbox covers network access and use in electricity and gas only, so it says nothing about experimentation elsewhere in French regulation.
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 chรดmage / 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.
๐ซ๐ทFrancesince 2005operating below its peakbears on Disaster preparedness and recovery
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 health ministry and EPRUS, later Santรฉ publique France, built a national stock of nearly two billion masks after the H5N1 scare. The directorate-general for health then let expiring and non-conforming lots go without replacement. It ordered 613 million surgical masks destroyed in 2018 and did not renew them, so the stock was close to empty when covid-19 arrived.
Preconditions
A dedicated stockpile agency with a budget line that survives years without a crisis
A replacement schedule tied to expiry dates and to changes in product standards, not to annual budget pressure
Political ownership of a stock target, so that a quiet downgrade from 'stock' to 'need' is visible and has to be defended
Where else it has been used: Most OECD countries rebuilt their medical stockpiles after 2020. The French case shows that procurement is not the hard part. The hard part is keeping the stock in date, and now the crisis-era stock faces its own expiry in 2026.
Limits: The status is the contestable part. The collapse from 2009 to 2019 is well documented, but the state rebuilt the stock during and after the crisis: Santรฉ publique France's January 2024 inventory, quoted in a 2025 Senate bill, counts 2.1 billion masks, more than the 2009 figure. The case for 'eroded' rests on two things. About 706 million of those masks had already expired, which leaves roughly 1.39 billion in date, a subtraction we made and the source does not publish. The same text says every mask bought during the crisis expires in 2026. The 2009 figure is itself overstated as capability, because the 613 million surgical masks bought in 2005 and 2006 later failed a 2014 standard. Measured in conforming masks, today's stock may exceed the 2009 one, so a reviewer could fairly argue for 'operating'. The Cour des comptes chapter on mask stock management (RALFSS, May 2025) did not open from this machine, because the host refused the connection, so its figures are cited only through the Senate text. The Senate figures were compiled by the commission from Santรฉ publique France data and are given in round numbers. Mask counts measure one input to pandemic readiness. They say nothing about distribution capacity, domestic production or the rest of the stock: drugs, gowns, gloves.
๐ซ๐ทFrancesince 2020delivered and closedbears on Institutional responsiveness
France scaled its short-time work scheme (activitรฉ 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.
The state widened eligibility and raised the compensation rate of an existing short-time work scheme by decree, and the state and Unรฉdic paid employers for hours not worked, so firms could cut hours instead of jobs.
Preconditions
A short-time work scheme already in law with an employer claims channel
A jointly managed unemployment insurance fund able to share the cost
Fiscal room to fund roughly a billion euros a week at the peak
Where else it has been used: The German Kurzarbeit model, which France's scheme resembles, did the same work in 2008-2009 and again in 2020; the existing legal channel is what let both pay within weeks.
Limits: Unรฉdic is a private-law association run jointly by the employer and union confederations that manages unemployment insurance under a statutory mandate; it is not a statistics office, and this is a signed analytical study (Oana Calavrezo) in which it reports on a programme it co-financed at about one third: 14.4 billion euros in 2020 and 2021 (11.5 billion of spending and 2.9 billion of forgone receipts), more than half of its deficit in those years. The counts are Unรฉdic's own calculations on the payment agency's claims data (ASP, Extranet Activitรฉ partielle, data at 17 January 2022, de-duplicated), stated in the full report linked from the page; the December 2021 months were provisional at that date. The labour ministry's statistics service (DARES) publishes the official series but its pages refused automated access on the retrieval date. The scheme existed before the crisis; what changed was its rules and scale, which the page describes as a change of scale 'in a few days' in the spring of 2020 without dating each decree. The count is of employees placed on the scheme, including long-term partial activity (APLD), not of jobs saved, and 45 percent of those placed on it only used it in the first lockdown. Cost per job and deadweight are not shown.
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.
A state-backed utility attempted a first-of-kind reactor after a long pause in domestic nuclear construction, while the regulator accumulated inspections and prescriptions as construction, manufacturing and testing problems appeared; the project delivered, but the decade-plus gap exposed how much build-and-supply-chain capability had gone unused.
Preconditions
A utility and regulator able to retain nuclear engineering knowledge through a long construction pause
A supply chain capable of qualifying safety-critical components to current standards
Political and financial capacity to carry a first-of-kind project through repeated redesigns
Where else it has been used: The EPR experience is now being used in France, Finland, China and the United Kingdom as a common warning about first-of-kind nuclear delivery. The lesson that travels is to rebuild the industrial base before promising a fleet, not to copy the reactor design alone.
Limits: The durations are calculated from the start and completion dates and from the previous commissioning date stated by the regulator; they do not isolate the causes of delay, the project's cost or the reactor's long-run availability. Flamanville eventually entered service and the regulator reports nearly 600 construction inspections, so the case documents a thin and difficult delivery capability rather than a project that never completed. The regulator describes its own oversight and is not an independent cost auditor.
๐ซ๐ทFrancesince 2016still operatingbears on Large project delivery
The Sociรฉtรฉ du Grand Paris, the state's public builder, renamed Sociรฉtรฉ 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.
The state created a dedicated public builder with its own earmarked taxes and the right to borrow on bond markets, so that a 200 km metro could be built in parallel rather than paid for line by line. The Senate notes this borrowing moved full delivery from 2075 to 2030, at the price of cost estimates that were revised upward as studies deepened and the Olympic deadline compressed the schedule.
Preconditions
A legal vehicle with earmarked revenue and borrowing power, kept off the annual budget
Enough in-house engineering staff to supervise thousands of contractors, which the Senate says was missing until after 2018
A political commitment to the whole network that survives changes of government, here confirmed in 2013 and again in 2018
Where else it has been used: The builder is now preparing France's regional express rail networks (SERM) using the same model. Those projects have no Olympic deadline and no Paris land values to borrow against.
Limits: The 60 percent overrun is our calculation from two Senate figures. The 2013 baseline is stated in 2012 euros. The 2026 page does not state the price basis of the 36.1 billion figure, but the 2020 Senate report (r20-044) gives the preceding estimate as '35,6 milliards d'euros aux conditions รฉconomiques de 2012', which points to constant 2012 euros, so the overrun is mostly real rather than inflation. Both figures are estimates to completion and not an audited outturn, and the network is still unfinished. The Senate reports that in February 2025 the builder announced new delays to line 15 south and the first sections of lines 16 and 17, so the cost figure, unchanged since 2021, may rise again. The 36.1 billion excludes the further 3.5 billion euros, and 700 million more in 2024, that the builder pays toward other รle-de-France transport projects. The source does not quantify schedule slippage against the 2013 or 2018 timetables. The Cour des comptes reports on the project, the primary audit source, did not open from this machine, so the figures come from parliament's reading of the builder's answers to its questionnaires.