France and Globalisation

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Consultants KPMG and French employers’ group Medef have just published a survey on attitudes to globalisation and outsourcing. Interestingly a higher percentage of employers than previously said they saw no benefit in moving jobs to countries with cheaper labour markets (56% compared with 29% last year), while 74 per cent said broader foreign investment had helped safeguard jobs in France. Is this an example of ‘double entendre’? Is it a real reflection of attitudes to globalisation, or a ‘packaging’ exercise where it is easier to advocate something as ‘new investment’ rather than ‘moving jobs’. At the same time the FT says,

But for those SMEs with a low turnover, or which lacked innovation, the lower-cost economies were still seen as a danger.There is a growing gulf between the strategies of such companies and larger or more innovative rivals, the report said.

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About Edward Hugh

Edward 'the bonobo is a Catalan economist of British extraction. After being born, brought-up and educated in the United Kingdom, Edward subsequently settled in Barcelona where he has now lived for over 15 years. As a consequence Edward considers himself to be "Catalan by adoption". He has also to some extent been "adopted by Catalonia", since throughout the current economic crisis he has been a constant voice on TV, radio and in the press arguing in favor of the need for some kind of internal devaluation if Spain wants to stay inside the Euro. By inclination he is a macro economist, but his obsession with trying to understand the economic impact of demographic changes has often taken him far from home, off and away from the more tranquil and placid pastures of the dismal science, into the bracken and thicket of demography, anthropology, biology, sociology and systems theory. All of which has lead him to ask himself whether Thomas Wolfe was not in fact right when he asserted that the fact of the matter is "you can never go home again".

One thought on “France and Globalisation”

  1. As I have also said in my crosspost of this subject I think the article is a bit ambigous especially as I haven’t been able to track down the survey.

    What really surprises me though is that 56% of the SMEs do not see any benefits of moving jobs abroad.

    It seems that the anti-globalist sentiments run a bit deeper i France than I had expected.

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