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Contents:

•   Governance and architecture of the system of unemployment benefits
•   Function insured part of the French regime
•   Other features: improving the functioning of the labor market and smooth out business cycle effects

Unemployment insurance was designed primarily to provide a replacement income for those without work. It also has important effects on the labor market, income distribution and level of activity.

An international comparison shows that in France the unemployment insurance:

• has a way of joint governance, unusual in Europe, to be linked with the complex architecture of the system (at three levels: insurance, solidarity, assistance);
• has a total contribution rate particularly high;
• by international guarantees a high level of income replacement, but the reserve in time for the unemployed with employment references the longest;
• This insurance-related properties (contributivité, proportionality, individualization) the most significant and, therefore, limited capacity of redistribution called "vertical";
• sometimes followed in managing a pro-cyclical logic which limited its stabilizing effects on the activity (especially in 1992 and 2000).

For thirty years, changes in the unemployment insurance scheme were many and often dictated by economic shocks and their financial consequences. After lying with rising unemployment, the duration of compensation have been greatly reduced since 1990, while access to compensation became easier. The scope of insurance has therefore moved from unemployment to long or recurrent unemployment transition. More eligible employees, but for periods less: such was the regime's response to rising unemployment recurring, while containing costs, offset by a smaller coverage of long-term unemployment, which support s is found transferred to the minimum income guaranteed by the public.

Finally, with regard to its efforts to promote the connection between supply and demand for labor, the insurance plan seems to have followed, over the last twenty years, the evolution of economic theory: focus on monetary incentives (change in duration of compensation; allowances graduated from 1992 to 2000) and on the activation of expenses (coaching and training from 2000 to 2008). After the merger of ANPE-Assédic, social partners are now contributing to the active side of the career security through governance of employment center and fund management joint vocational training, unemployment insurance returning to its original function of essentially passive compensation. However, the regime has largely kept out measures to reduce labor costs.

•   Authors: Jean-Louis Dayan and Christel Gilles , Department of Labour-Employment.

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