The EconomistMay 16th 2020 Europe 412
1sentenced France Telecom’s former boss to
a year in prison (with eight months sus-
pended) in a criminal case brought after
the suicide of several employees over a de-
cade ago. In normal times, this breeds cau-
tion. Under covid-19, as managers scrub of-
fices and install plexiglass partitions, even
more so. After much lobbying, the liability
has been limited a bit for employers and
mayors, but only during the crisis.
Already, an astonishing 63 legal com-
plaints have been filed against ministers,
including Edouard Philippe, the prime
minister, and Olivier Véran, the health
minister. Many of the complaints are
bound to be dismissed. But ministers
could yet be hauled before a special court.
In 1999 a contaminated-blood case was
brought against Laurent Fabius, a former
prime minister. He was charged with man-
slaughter, but acquitted in court. That he
faced such grave charges in the first place
scares decision-makers today.
Still, many people are itching to go back
to work. “I’m really relieved to be back, I
couldn’t bear confinement,” says Joseph
cheerfully on his first day back at a men’s
outfitter in Paris. While shops were shut he
was on chômage partiel, a furlough scheme
under which the government paid 84% of
his wages. Now he is back on full salary.
Elsewhere in France, Renault has partially
reopened car factories without difficulty.
Many office staff continue le télétravail, or
work from home, easing pressure on trains
and buses. Despite the anxiety, 1.5m prim-
ary-school pupils, or roughly one in five,
have filed back to the classroom.
Yet there is an underlying fearfulness,
which Yann Algan, an economist at Sci-
ences Po university, links to a “particular
lack of trust in French society” towards in-
stitutions, employers and government.
During confinement “distrust” was the sin-
gle most-cited feeling by the French in a
poll for Sciences Po, while for Germans and
Brits it was “calm”. This, says Mr Algan, “is
the key to understanding why the return to
work will be slower and more complicated
in France than in Germany”. In May, despite
déconfinement, François Villeroy de Gal-
hau, the governor of the Bank of France, ex-
pects the economy to operate at only 83%
capacity, after 73% in April.
The balance between safety and pros-
perity is perilous. As Eric Chaney of the In-
stitut Montaigne, a think-tank, points out,
chômage partiel(which covers 12.4m work-
ers) has been the right policy to avoid lay-
offs, “but creates the wrong incentives
about returning to work”. The government
now talks about gradually shifting the cost
of the scheme to employers from June.
Having played so well to French angoisse to
impose confinement, the government may
find it peculiarly hard to secure the trust
needed to assuage those fears, and get the
country fully back to work. 7I
t is an odd admission for the boss of a
national statistical agency. Not only are
many of his numbers wrong, says Apos-
tol Simovski, head of North Macedonia’s
statistical office, but he has no idea what
the right ones might be. Officially, there
are 2.08m people in his country. In fact,
he says: “I am afraid there are no more
than 1.5m, but I cannot prove it.”
Countless calculations—income per
head, number of bathtubs per head—
depend on knowing how many heads
there are. If Mr Simovski is right and
there are 27.5% fewer people in North
Macedonia than officially estimated,
then gdpper head, among other things,
will be much higher. However, the true
population may be between 1.6m and1.8m,saysIzetZeqiri, an economist.
Until there is a census, no one will know.
The last count was in 2002. An at-
tempt to update it in 2011 turned into a
fiasco. Nationalist Macedonian poli-
ticians and those from the country’s
Albanian minority encouraged their
supporters to list lots of family members
who lived abroad. When officials realised
that the totals would be fantastical, the
process was aborted.
A new census was planned for April
this year. However, when a snap election
was called, the census was postponed.
And the election itself was then post-
poned because of covid-19. As a result,
says Verica Janeska, an economist, the
government cannot make well-informed
economic decisions.
In 2019, for the first time in history,
more Macedonians died than were born.
Births and deaths, at least, are accurately
counted. Harder to gauge are the num-
bers who move abroad to work. Some
81,000 have Bulgarian passports. This
means they can work easily and legally in
the eu. It also means they don’t show up
as Macedonians on any foreign database.
Unemployment used to be a big problem.
Now labour shortages are emerging as a
bigger one. This is a problem across the
Balkans, but in all Europe only North
Macedonia and Ukraine, which last held
a census in 2001, share the honour of not
knowing even roughly how many people
they have.Lies, damned lies...
North Macedonia...and Macedonian statisticsA
s bleary-eyedEuropeans squint in the
sun, freshly released from coronavirus
lockdowns, worries about a second wave of
infections are on everybody’s mind. Life
cannot return completely to normal until a
vaccine is available. What sort of semi-nor-
mal life might work in the meantime is the
big question. Sweden may hold the answer.
In March, when governments across
Europe seemed to be competing to impose
the toughest anti-viral measures—from
closing borders to forbidding people from
venturing out even for a walk—Sweden re-sisted the temptation. It banned gatherings
of more than 50 people. But nurseries and
schools for children under 16 have re-
mained open (with older students tele-
learning from home). Bars, restaurants and
gyms also stayed open, though with social-
distancing rules. People were asked to
work from home if they could. And the el-
derly, who are most at risk of dying if in-
fected, were told to stay at home to protect
themselves.
Sweden chose this path because it
looked at the longer term, says Johan Gie-
secke, an epidemiologist advising the au-
thorities. Full lockdowns are stop-gap
measures, he says, and European govern-
ments rushed to put them in place without
plans for what would replace them.
Swedes have been sensible. Use of pub-
lic transport has fallen significantly. A
third of people say they avoid going to their
workplace (by working from home, for ex-
ample)—up from 10% in mid-March. DailySweden shunned a hard lockdown. Was
that wise?Controlling covid-19The Swedish way