This change has been prompted notably by the new information and communication technologies and by the realisation that the spread in Europe of pre-inflationary bottlenecks is, in itself, an obstacle to growth that is robust and sustainable because it is non-inflationary. To entrench this change in attitude, our strategy should move in three directions to:  5  BIS Review 115/2000  •  ease the constraints on labour. Some 53% of companies currently report that they are facing serious recruitment difficulties, notwithstanding the 9.4% unemployment rate. It is therefore necessary to step up the education, training and integration of people hitherto excluded from the workforce. Companies in particular must increase their efforts. As the Monetary Policy Council has been recommending for the past three years, a more extensive use of overtime should be accepted, especially in sectors where there is a labour shortage. More generally, the increase in Europe’s employment rate from the current 61% to 70% in ten years’ time, an objective which was confirmed by the European Council meeting in Nice and which aims at expanding the available workforce, is particularly timely and reveals a profound change in attitude;  •  invest massively and loosen the constraints on capital. Investment is essential in our economy in which the capacity utilisation rate is currently at a historic high, and where an increasing proportion of companies—41% today, as opposed to 30% at the end of 1999—are experiencing production bottlenecks.

It is mainly because the French economy has preserved and strengthened its competitiveness over a long period that we have, in the past four years, enjoyed growth that is robust and more rapid than that of the other large European countries, while also maintaining a large current account surplus. The multipartisan strategy of low inflation and competitiveness, conducted consistently and tenaciously over a long period, must be steadfastly pursued in the single currency context. Fourthly, the gradual change in the mindset governing our perception of economic phenomena The objective of durable, sustained and non-inflationary growth, which could force unemployment down to its low tidemark, could be more easily achieved if Europe and France gradually adopted an open attitude towards the important “factors of production”, namely labour, capital and technical progress. For a long time, persistent mass unemployment, the structural causes of which were poorly understood, led to the adoption of certain neo-Malthusian attitudes: efforts to reduce the available workforce in order to curtail unemployment, spurning productivity-enhancing investment thought to contribute to higher unemployment and, finally, wariness towards technical progress, which was seen as a potential destroyer of jobs. Little wonder that after seeking to limit the available workforce, capital stock and technical progress, Europe and France saw that their non-inflationary growth potential was still not as high as they would have wished, despite the significant advances made in recent years. Fortunately, a profound change in perspective is underway in Europe and France, and we are discarding neo-Malthusian attitudes.