International Openness In France Essay

The French consider international openness as the first cause of unemployment. The bottom-line idea is that they think, they believe that the growth of large emerging countries (China, India, Brazil, etc.) is a negative factor for French companies and for employment, because it is somehow slowing down their growth, their activities and therefore their profits. The belief that outsourcing, also called offshoring (the process leading to a transfer of activity from the national territory to foreign countries) is at the origin of most of the job destruction and is clearly symptomatic of this phenomenon of rejection of globalization. Indeed, outsourcings are in fact responsible for less than 10% of the suppression of jobs in France. Moreover, beyond job destruction, it is the ability (or inability) to create new ones that should focus

Indeed, beyond the effects of international exchange on prices, globalization is often made guilty of unemployment. However, it is necessary to make a proper distinction between the effects directly linked to the international openness of trade and those related to the impact of technical progress. Indeed, technical progress, in other words innovation, can reduce the amount for workers needed to produce a good, and can therefore increase unemployment. In this context, combined globalization and technical progress are changing the French productivity, performance and the distribution of wealth. For the effects of globalization and technical progress to be generally positive, workers should be able to easily change jobs, businesses, industries or regions. In France, mobility is very low. Moreover, when it exists, it is largely suffered, more than it is intended. Indeed, employees who change jobs are mainly those on fixed-term contracts, or on a temporary basis. Consequently, France is potentially more fragile than other countries in the face of the adverse effects of