Dear Sir,

There are a number of factual errors in John Thornhill's article about France's economy ("Why France may find its social model exacts too high a price") which I hope you will correct in a forthcoming edition.

1. Your graph about youth unemployment incorrectly states that the 22% refers to the percentage of young people that are unemployed, when it is in fact the percentage of the active young population, something quite different, as your colleague Simon Briscoe pointed out in a very explicit grpah published on 20 April 2006 and attached to this message;

2. Your statement that "France is the only eurozone country that has not reduced the financial weight of the state over the past 10 years", is also incorrect as well as highly misleading in that it refers only to the eurozone, when the two most significant examples of countries with actual increases in public spending are the USA and the UK (as demonstrated in the attached graph, from your 19 September 2006 edition) - the two economies usually shown as an example for France and, not coincidentally maybe, those with higher than average growth over that period.

I look forward to your corrections.