France under pressure to make further cuts to meet its targets
THE EUROPEAN Commission and rating agency Standard & Poor’s (S&P) piled pressure on France yesterday to overhaul its finances more rigorously after the EU gave the Socialist government more leeway to meet targets.
French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici has said the Eurozone’s second-biggest economy cannot be reformed any faster, fending off criticism that it is dragging its feet.
President Francois Hollande’s government amended labour laws earlier this year and outlined an overhaul of the indebted pension scheme last month.
“France is going in the right direction but more ambition wouldn’t do any harm, especially on the question of France’s competitiveness,” Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso said yesterday.
France had yet to demonstrate that it can consolidate spending and S&P’s chief soverign ratings officer Moritz Kraemer said and said “the government will have to face this issue.”