France Expects No Positive Jobless Data On Feeble Growth: PM

France, where more than three million unemployed people are still struggling to find jobs, would not report an improvement in the job market due to poor growth, the country's Prime Minister Manuel Valls said on Thursday.
"When we have such feeble economy, we cannot, obviously, wait for good (unemployment) news," Valls told the news channel BFMTV. "We have not used all the tools to combat unemployment," he added in a move to appease rising woes.
With a 30 billion euro (38 billion U.S. dollar) cut in payroll charges and by pumping millions of euro to finance job contracts for poorly-skilled young people without work, the government aims to encourage investment and recruitments in order to bring the number of jobless people down to less than three million by the end of 2017.
Analysts said the eurozone's second largest economy needed to quicken its growth at least by 1 percent to start absorbing the large slice of jobseekers.
For 2014, the government slashed growth target to 0.4 percent from an initial target of 1 percent, blaming weak domestic economic activities at home and in Europe doorstep. (Cihan/Xinhua)