La réduction des taux d’activité aux âges extrêmes, une spécificité française ?

Today, working in the industrialized countries is mainly a matter of middle-aged people (25 to 54 year old). This is particularly true in France where the participation rate for the less than 25 year old people is the smallest one in OECD countries and that for men older than 54 one of the smallest. For the last thirty years, the participation rate of the youngest and oldest working people has been significantly decreasing, apart that of old women due to the increasing trending female participation rate. To illustrate the causes of these changes, we model from a descriptive point of view male and female participation rates for the following age classes: 15 to 19, 20 to 24, 55 to 59 and 60 to 64. Modelling old people participation rate allows us to illustrate the importance of political measures used over the last thirty years to deal with unemployment, in particular the development of early retirement programs and the decrease of the retirement age. Modelling young people participation rate does not give a leading part to a particular cause among the various ones we consider (development of apprenticeship, increasing number of students passing the baccalauréat, population structure, unemployment rate…). In both situations, we measure only weak, if any, response of participation rates to short-term unemployment rate changes.