Suggestions about France

Democracy 4 General Discussion
1

Hi. I’m French so excuse me in advance for my english mistakes.

I am a huge fan of Demcracy 3 and Democracy 4. In order to help you improve the game, I would like to make a few remarks about the realism of the parameters in France. I think some little things could be improved.

  1. The Tax System
  • The payroll tax (we call it “cotisations sociales”) provides a far much larger share of the tax revenue (37% of the total tax revenues in 2017). The payroll tax only funds the welfare state. For example, the retirement social contribution directly funds the public retirement fund.
  • The traditional progressive Income Tax as your know in the USA or in the UK provides very low tax revenues (72 Billions of € out of more than 1000 Billions of €).
  • But, in fact, there are two income taxes in France. In addition to the traditional income tax, there is a flat tax called CSG (“Generalised social contribution” in English). As the payroll tax, the CSG only funds the welfare state. This flat tax provides higher contributions that the progressive income tax : more than 120 Billions of €).
  1. The Welfare State
  • The French health system isn’t similar to the UK. There is a state health service but it’s only one of the pieces of the system. A great share of healthcare is provided by “médecins libéraux” : doctors who have their own private cabinet. The cares provided by this doctors are tax funded : patients get a reimbursement of the health assurance after their consultation.
  1. The economic situation
  • I think that the game underestimate the economical performance of France. The GDP Gap at the beginning of the game between France and Germany is far to high. German GDP is only 42% higher that French GDP.
  • This underestimation of the GDP is caused by an underestimation of the productivity. According to the OECD? the productivity of French workers is higher than the productivity of the workers of the UK and at the same level as the productivity of the American workers.

One last thing : I’m rather a liberal and a socialist but even on an objective point of view, I think that the impact of immigration on unemployment and wages is far too high. It makes impossible for a player to have an health economical situation with full employment if the player doesn’t implement a very harsh and violent immigration policy. In fact, countries such as Sweden and Germany were almost at full employment before the COVID Crisis while they had a high immigration during the past years.

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