The “bill for the activity and equal economic opportunity” was presented to the French parliament on January 26th 2015. It is noteworthy for being wide-ranging. It addresses three priorities: freeing up certain sectors and activities, encouraging investment, and modifying some aspects of work legislation to increase employment.
With 106 articles, the initial project teems with complexity, addressing topics as diverse as coach transportation, work on Sunday, employees’ savings plans, regulated law professions or environmental regulations for industrial development. The complexity of the law and its structural impacts called for a precise assessment of its effects. This is the task that a commission of ten economists, formed by Jean Pisani-Ferry, commissioner general for France Stratégie, carried out.
From the beginning, it was clear that the commission could not study all of the measures encompassed in the law. Its members decided to focus on five sets of measures from which the greatest effects in terms of employment and activity could be expected. Some of them were quite polemical: relaxing the regulation on the work on Sunday, reforming regulated law professions (most notably solicitors). Other measures were more difficult to grasp for the public and the media and sometimes uncertain in their effects: reforming employment tribunals or modifying competition rules in commercial urban development.
