The OECD defended France’s controversial pension reform bill on Friday and called on the government to implement it.
“We are living longer and longer in better health,” so “we have to agree to work a little harder,” OECD Secretary General Mathias Cormann told a news conference on the global economic outlook.
“We have to agree to work a little more”
The current pension systems were put in place “at a time when life expectancy was lower,” he stressed, adding that they were “based on cost assumptions that are no longer valid.”
“After all the ground covered, I am sure that the French government will stand and will have to stay on its line and go all the way,” Mathias Cormann said.
“The effective retirement age in France is low” compared to other countries, added Alvaro Pereira, the organization’s acting chief economist.
The French government announced on Thursday that it would not submit the pension reform project, which provides for an increase in the retirement age from 62 to 64, to the vote of the deputies, preferring to commit its responsibility on the text, at the risk of seeing it adopted , a motion of censure against him.
This reform project is rejected by a large majority of French, hundreds of thousands of whom have mobilized eight times taking to the streets.
Source: BFM TV
