However:

rance has actually enjoyed stronger job growth than the U.K. over that period (14% vs. 11%), and fewer of those jobs were created in the public sector -- 300,000, or 15%, of the new jobs in France are government jobs, versus 860,000, or 45%, in Britain.

In that sense, the higher unemployment rate in France comes from the fact that the French working-age population during that period has increased by 12% compared to only 6% in Britain.

I'm not an economist, so you have to educate me if I'm wrong, but I feel you are undercutting your own point with this two data points here. Wouldn't relative job growth, that is relative to population or working-age population growth, be the number that really counts? Given that population growth is also market growth? The relative growth (relative to working-age population with your numbers) would be about 2% for France and 5% for Britain.

BTW, I feel this is further support for my theory that the age structure of a country does not really matter for the economy, if we combine budgets for retirement and joblessness. (I.e., the high population growth of France only means that while less money has to be taken away from workers to pay for the elderly, more has to be taken away to finance jobless benefits.)

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}