“The lever is productivity, therefore, innovation.” Guest at BFM Business this Wednesday morning, Antonin Bergeaud, a prize for the best young economist 2025 and associated professor in HAR, warned against the weakness of productivity in France and its impact on growth.
“I would like to make people understand (…) that the deceleration in productivity gains is something quite problematic. Not because it is absolutely necessary to have a growth at all costs without thinking” but because “our economic system and in particular the financing of our social system is based on the idea that we will have growth, that every year we enrich ourselves,” he said.
According to him, “a large part of the debates we have in pensions, in public finances, comes mainly from the fact that we no longer have growth because we can no longer generate productivity, because we can no longer be quite innovative, because we have lost a lot of engines that we have had for decades.”
Antonin Bergeaud acknowledges that increasing productivity to stimulate growth is not simple. But when that fails, it will be necessary to “act on other levers, that is, additional work time, put more people in employment (…)”.
“The simplest thing in the short term is to increase the working time (…) if you want to increase GDP, but I think you do not want to increase the working time. It is very difficult to pass as a message,” continues the economist, and adds that it does not go so much in the sense of history that is rather to reduce working time, particularly with “the boom.”
“Productivity and well -being at work go together”
The economist regrets that the term “productivity” is “often negatively connoted, because we believe it means that you have to move more (at work), that you have to be a bit more exploited.” However, “I don’t think they are more productive people. The French work quite effectively,” he said.
For him, productivity profits go above all through a questioning of “collective systems”, “organization of work” and “innovation and investment in technologies”.
We must also “also be able to say that it must stop protecting certain companies and perhaps the credits reassening others, because there are companies that are not productive enough,” says Antonin Bergeaud calling to “promote in particular the reallocation of employment to the most productive companies because when you are stuck in a practical business, stagnant wages and in general little dysfunction, it makes workers identified.”
In summary, “productivity is not at all something that one must necessarily oppose a form of well -being at work. On the contrary, the two go together,” he concludes.
Source: BFM TV
