It is urgent to postpone retirement to maintain the economically active population, affirms BM in support of Macron

Given a longer life expectancy, increasing the retirement age is necessary to maintain the proportion of the economically active population despite aging, recommended Monday the chief economist of the World Bank (WB), Indermit Gill.

Taking as an example FranceGill recalled that in that country they “sees a 20-year increase in life expectancy since 1950″. “We must therefore expect people to work longer”, he emphasized.

“There are people who refuse to work even two more years despite this two-decade increase in life expectancy”, added Gill, according to him, a sign of the difficulty of accepting an idea that he sees as a necessity.

“We observe a drop in the proportion of the (economically) active population” in the global population of rich countries, and maintaining this percentage is necessary to “reduce the effects of aging on economic growth“, he claimed.

“But for that, it is necessary that someone make the necessary structural reformsGill insisted.

Definitively adopted on March 20 without a vote in the National Assembly, after appealing to article 49-3 of the Constitution by French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, the pension reform, which provides for an increase in the legal retirement age from 62 to 64 years old, he is the object of a strong social movement of rejection that hardened more than a week ago in the streets of France.

French President Emmanuel Macron must wait for the Constitutional Council to validate the text before he can enact it into law.

Its adoption led to the radicalization of a part of the opposition to the reform, with almost daily clashes between the forces of order and some groups of protesters, particularly in Paris and large cities.

A new day of mobilization is scheduled for Tuesday in France against this questioned reform.

Source: AFP