Introduction

With 58.4 million inhabitants recorded in the 1999 census, metropolitan France has the same-sized population as the United Kingdom, although the French are spread over more than twice the land surface. At the beginning of the twenty-first century France is still, narrowly, and depending on how you measure it, the world’s fourth or fifth biggest economy. Although its national output was more than six times smaller than that of the United States, two and a quarter times smaller than Japan’s and a third smaller than Germany’s, in 1996 its 22-million ‘active’ population produced slightly more ‘purchasing power parities’ than did the United Kingdom’s 26 million, and slightly fewer by 2001. The current economic strength of France is largely built upon annual increases in productivity averaging 3 per cent per year between 1960 and 1994, measured by real GDP per employed person, nearly double the rate in the United Kingdom over the same period (OECD 1996a: 53).