European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has described France’s 2014 budget as “satisfactory”, but warned that more taxes would hurt further growth and employment, according to an AFP report on Monday.
France’s parliament has passed a law that will prevent online book retailers, such as Amazon, from offering discounted books at free delivery, in a bill designed to support the nation’s struggling small bookstores, which have long been seen as a guardian of French language and culture.
The new law, which will now head for ratification by the Senate, was first proposed by Culture Minister Aurélie Filippetti, who had accused Amazon in the past for “dumping” books in the local market.
Employees and management staff at 14 home improvement stores in France could face fines of up to 120,000 euros per shop, after they defied a long-standing government law prohibiting businesses from remaining open on Sundays, in an interesting clash of ideologies between the need for work-life balance and workers’ struggle to find jobs.
France needs to accelerate labour market reforms and avoid new taxes to sustain a tentative return to growth, the International Monetary Fund said on Monday, while warning that unemployment would keep rising this year and next in the eurozone’s second-biggest economy.
In an annual health check of the French economy, the IMF said the country has made considerable progress in cutting spending, predicting that the deficit will drop to 3.9 percent of GDP in 2013, down from 4.8 percent in 2012.
France’s foreign intelligence service, the Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure (DGSE), has been sweeping up nearly all data transmissions, including telephone calls, e-mails and social media activity, that come in and out of France, reported French daily Le Monde on Thursday, claiming that the French state was able to use the surveillance “to spy on anybody at any time”.
The French government is considering a tax on the sale of all Internet-linked mobile devices, including smartphones and e-readers, in order to “protect the nation’s cultural exception … in the face of digital innovation,” reported the Financial Times on Monday.
The Representative Council of Black Associations (CRAN), a leading anti-racism watchdog group in France, is filing a lawsuit against state-owned bank Caisse des dépôts et de consignations (CDC), alleging that the bank had illegally profited from the slave trade in Haiti between 1804 and 1946, collecting sums equal to $21 billion from the former colony.
President Francois Hollande on Tuesday admitted that France’s public deficit will “without a doubt” be 3.7 percent of its output this year, significantly above the 3 percent he promised to cut it to during his election campaign last year.
During the French elections last year, Hollande had repeatedly vowed to bring the deficit down from 4.5 percent to 3 percent this year, and had insisted this was possible until his admission of defeat yesterday.
The head of U.S. tyremaker Titan International has launched a brutal attack on productivity in France, telling the government to keep its “so-called workers” who command a high pay despite working “only three hours” a day.
Paris may be known worldwide as the “City of Light”, but Parisians will have no choice but to embrace the darkness starting from July 1, reported Reuters, after the French environment ministry issued a decree on Wednesday ordering all non-residential properties to switch off their lights at night.
