Dégressivité des allocations chômage : que peut-on en attendre ?

Declining unemployment benefits is a popular provision of Unemployment Insurance, due to its intuitive mechanism of financial pressure on benefits recipients. However, it faces strong opposition from the targeted unemployed, and also in the economic literature. Indeed, when analyzing declining UI benefits into a comprehensive landscape of the various aspects of unemployment insurance, a large majority of economic studies rule out this design, theory largely favors constant or progressive benefits and, despite the immediate gains of a declining pattern as regards exits from unemployment and a fall of insurance expenditure, economic evaluations conclude to many adverse effects. In practice, only a minority of countries similar to France have implemented declining UI benefits. Despite this inauspicious background the insurer may choose this formula preventing the odds: if so, declining benefits should be part of a coherent set of UI rules, allowing for positive effects to materialize and preventing adverse effects. Reviewing the rules that will soon be implemented in France, five aspects are highlighted that could raise difficulties. We propose operational solutions that can shed light and feed the round of negotiation currently underway.