vii This largely falls within national remits, but should be pursued within an upward-levelling European convergence: namely the Northern European solutions, including a much greater development of apprenticeships and professional training. Lastly, by pooling our funding. I mean, partly, public investment programmes, such as those enabled by the famous "Next Generation EU", that decisive breakthrough from the Covid crisis. But a private driver is at least equally important: Europe must be able to harness and  Page 7 sur 15 redirect its domestic savings, which are the largest in the world; in recent years, we have had a surplus of domestic savings over investment of almost EUR 300 billion per year. These savings should be channelled towards the equity financing of companies, which is a method of financing that is particularly well suited to innovative projects – which are inherently riskier and require long-term support, but which are also more profitable if successful. Our lag visà-vis the United States in this area is striking: the largest European venture capital firm appears to be three times smaller than the 10th largest US one. The technical agenda has been identified, but politically is not very clear and is far too slow in its implementation: it is the Capital Markets Union (CMU). On the one hand, we have resources – savings – and on the other, the investment needs of companies: we must decisively accelerate a European financial ecosystem that better allocates the former to the latter, if we want to finance the forthcoming digital and environmental revolutions. III.
The most striking symptom of this is the recruitment difficulties reported by 52% of companiesix , with around 300,000 unfilled jobsx, even though France still counts 2.4 million unemployed, xi including 600,000 young people. This is an economically unacceptable paradox, but even more so socially. Page 9 sur 15  There is no greater priority than to get out of this French impasse, and in order to do so, to understand the problem by comparing our situation with that of Germany, which is at full employment (with an unemployment rate of 3.4%xii). While hourly productivity is similar, the average number of hours worked per capita is 10% higher in Germany. This difference is largely due to our low employment rate. While in the mid-2000s, our employment rate stood at 63%, which was roughly identical to the German rate (64%)xiii, it is now clearly lagging behind even though it has started rising (67% compared to 75%).xiv This gap is partly due to the more widespread use of part-time work and work-study schemes in Germany. Nevertheless, for a working-age population of just over 40 million people, this gap represents a shortfall of close to 3 million jobs, which mainly concerns young people (1.2 million missing jobs) and seniors (1.3 million). So let's first talk about young people, then seniors, and then about the measures for all working people. Page 10 sur 15 For the past decade, the share of young people who are not in employment, education or training (the so-called NEETs) has remained stable overall.