It doesn't quite work that way. First of all, in order to collect unemployment benefits in France, you must be actively looking for work. If you are being offe

It doesn't quite work that way. First of all, in order to collect unemployment benefits in France, you must be actively looking for work. If you are being offered a job and don't take it, your benefits will be cut. Second, you generally don't get 80% of your previous income. You get one of the following: 57.4% of your previous salary. 40.4% of your previous salary + 11.57 Euro per day, to a maximum of 75% of your previous salary, and no less than 28.21 Euro per day. If you get 75% of your previous salary, then only because your income was pretty low to begin with. (And I'm pretty sure there are more inaccuracies; the GP looks like it's been taken from some tabloid.) As to who pays for it: The majority of social expenditures are actually for pensions and health. In 2005, France spent about 7.5% of its total social expenditures on unemployment [1] -- and the unemployment rate wasn't much lower back then -- as opposed to 37.4% on pensions and 29.8% on health (I note that France has one of the more efficient healthcare systems in the world, and a rather good one, too). What a lot of people both in the US and the EU don't understand is that dealing with unemployment in a reasonable way is not actually all that expensive. Full benefits are generally only being paid for a short time, long-term benefits (subsistence level or slightly above) are not very expensive, and the structural costs of not doing it (such as increased crime rates) are probably more expensive in the long run. [1] http://imgur.com/42DLRK4 http://imgur.com/42DLRK4