Transcription
At 3 hours by TGV from Paris, there exists a country that has no oil, no access to the sea, no large domestic market, a territory stuck in the heart of Europe. This country is Switzerland, 9 million inhabitants, roughly the population of Île-de-France. And yet, when we look at the figures, the small Alpine giant has resolved one by one most of the problems that France has been dragging for 40 years. Less debt, less unemployment, higher salaries, balanced public accounts, and a standard of living that attracts hundreds of thousands of French people each year. So, naturally, a question arises: what if France copied its Helvetic neighbor, would we all become richer? Would our salaries eventually increase? And above all, would the debt be absorbed? Well, prepare yourselves to dive behind the scenes of one of the richest countries in Europe. Welcome to the Swiss model.
239,000 is the number of French people who head towards the border every morning and go to Switzerland. Not for the scenery, not for the chocolate, but to work. By the end of 2025, more than 180,000 French people were even residing there permanently. And at the same time, when you look at the payslip, you have to understand them. Let's take two people. On one side, Thomas, 30 years old, a cashier in a supermarket in France. He gets up early in the morning, spends his day sitting, scans hundreds of items, at the checkout, [music] manages the queues. At the end of the month, Thomas earns around the minimum wage. On the other side, a few kilometers behind the border, there is Julien. Same job, same checkout, same fatigue at the end of the day. Except that in Switzerland, his payslip can exceed 4000 francs per month. Two men, almost identical work, and yet two different economic realities.
So, naturally, a nuance is necessary. Switzerland generally pays much better, but it is also more expensive to live there. Consumer prices are about 56% higher than in France. Food is 47% more, housing even worse. So no, a salary twice as large does not mean a life twice as good. But even after adjusting for the cost of living, the Swiss advantage does not disappear. According to the CDE, the average Swiss salary remains more than 40% higher than the average French salary. And to understand why, we need to look at what happens between what the employer pays and what actually ends up in the employee's pocket.
In France, labor is one of the areas where the state levies the most. For an employee to receive their net salary, the employer must pay much more, including employer contributions, employee contributions, CSG, and other various contributions. [music] A part of the value created disappears before it even reaches the employee's pockets. As a result, the employee considers their salary too low, the employer finds labor too expensive, and the craziest thing is that, overall, both are right.
Conversely, in Switzerland, contributions and taxes obviously exist. The country is not a tax haven, but the levies on labor are less suffocating. A larger portion of the value created goes directly to the employee. Generally, the burden of levies is much lower than in France. VAT is 8.1% [music] compared to 20% in our country. Corporate tax is often between 12% and 15% depending on the cantons, compared to 25% in France. And in total, mandatory levies represent about 1/4 of Swiss GDP compared to over 43% in France. In other words, Switzerland not only taxes less, it taxes differently. It lightens more what produces, labor, business, consumption, but it still taxes wealth, notably with an annual wealth tax, not just on real estate, but on all assets, stocks, cash, financial assets, participations.
France abolished the ISF in 2018 [music] to replace it with a tax focused on real estate. Switzerland, on the contrary, continues to make high net worth individuals contribute each year, and proportionally, this tax weighs much more heavily on Swiss revenue than our former wealth tax weighed on French revenue. So the issue is not simply that Switzerland taxes the rich less. It's more subtle than that. It better protects labor and business while still making wealth contribute. And behind this fiscal difference, there is an even deeper difference: visibility.
In France, a large part of the cost of the system is invisible. It is drowned in contributions, in CSG, in public deficits, in incomprehensible lines on the payslip. We pay a lot but without always clearly seeing what we are financing. In Switzerland, it's almost the opposite. You receive more, but then you pay more yourself. And above all, you see it; health insurance arrives as a real monthly bill. Retirement is based on several pillars, including a capitalized part. Taxes vary by canton. Costs are more directly linked to political decisions. The system may be tougher, sometimes more brutal, but it has a fundamental quality. It is more readable, and this readability changes everything. When an expense is visible, it becomes debatable. When a tax is visible, it becomes political. When a bill arrives in the mailbox, no one can pretend it doesn't exist anymore.
This is also why direct democracy works in Switzerland, because citizens do not just vote for promises. They know that one day they will also have to vote for the bill. In France, we love to debate rights, aid, protections, new expenses, but we look much less often at the real price. In Switzerland, this question comes up constantly. Who pays, how much, and with what money? And perhaps this is where our Helvetic neighbor shows us its greatest divergence from France. It is not just a country where work pays better; it is a country where the cost of collective choices is more visible.
But a model where work pays better can only hold up if a country manages to employ more people. And this is where, as you will see, Switzerland shows us a second major divergence. But just before continuing, I have a message for all those who are interested in investing and want to diversify their savings. Our partner MATLIAR is a Swiss crowdfunding platform that allows you to lend directly to European companies and receive a fixed income paid monthly in return. The average return is between 12% and 16% per year depending on the projects, and over 33,000 investors have already financed there. More than 1100 projects for over 91 million euros invested and over 24 million euros repaid. MCLIARIR operates under Swiss regulation via Polyg SRO with funds held in segregated accounts. The platform only selects solid applications backed by real collateral. Up to 90% of loan applications are rejected from the initial analysis. You can invest today from €50 in different countries and sectors. For example, a logistics company in Finland or even an IT company in Bulgaria. And right now, all new registrants can benefit from a €15 bonus of 3% cashback for 90 days, as well as €30 offered for every full €500 invested on the primary market. I invite you to discover Maclear via my link in the description, and we'll continue. [music]
Because in reality, the most impressive Swiss figure is perhaps not the salary, but the employment rate. In France, it hovers around 69%, in Switzerland, it exceeds 80%. Imagine a 10-point difference, and that changes everything. In Switzerland, young people enter employment faster. Seniors remain active longer. The market circulates better; Swiss unemployment is one of the lowest in Europe, and among young people, the gap with France is striking. Using comparable methods, that of the International Labour Office, unemployment for those under 25 approaches 20% in France. In Switzerland, around 9%, more than twice as low.
But then, how is this possible? What does Switzerland do that France doesn't? Well, the easy answer would be to say that the Swiss have more flexible labor laws, simpler dismissals, and that's partly true. But the real difference doesn't start with the first permanent contract; it starts mostly at school. In France, for nearly 50 years, a single idea of success has been hammered home: [music] go as far as possible in general studies, get the baccalaureate, continue at university, aim for a master's degree, obtain the highest possible diploma. And in this scheme, apprenticeships have long been perceived as a secondary path, as a solution for those who had not succeeded elsewhere. A form of relegation. As a result, we have trained young people with good diplomas but who enter the job market later and often arrive in a professional world that already demands experience before even giving them their first real chance.
In Switzerland, it's the complete opposite. About two-thirds of young people opt for dual vocational training after compulsory schooling. Part of the time is spent in a company, part in school. They learn a trade, they are paid, they build experience, and they enter the real economy much earlier. It is not a fallback option; it is a central path. The programs cover hundreds of trades. Professional branches participate in their design. And a very important point: many companies do not see apprentices as a burden but as a real profitable investment.
So, France has indeed attempted a shift. The number of contracts has exploded from 300,000 to nearly 880,000 per year, a success on paper. Except that this boom has cost up to 15 billion euros in subsidies, and it has mainly inflated higher education and services. Meanwhile, industrial, artisanal, and technical fields remained much less valued. When a young person enters employment earlier, they gain experience earlier, they save earlier, they contribute earlier, they stop being a cost waiting to become a real productive force.
But well, all this is very nice, because employing more people is not enough. We still need to place all these people in sectors capable of creating a lot of value, because a country where everyone works but in unprofitable activities does not become rich. And this is where Switzerland has understood a rule that France should meditate on. An expensive country must be able to sell expensively. When we think of Switzerland, we often think of banks, watches, and chocolate. But in reality, the true Swiss economic engine is much deeper. Switzerland is pharmaceuticals, fine chemicals, precision machinery, MedTech, luxury watchmaking, global trading. Chemistry and pharmaceuticals alone account for more than half of the country's exports. Nearly 150 billion francs per year, Roche, Novartis, molecules that the whole world pays for at a high price. As a result, a trade surplus of 60 billion in 2024 and the title of the most innovative country in the world for 15 consecutive years.
When your salaries are among the highest in the world with expensive land, a strong currency, and a tiny domestic market, you don't win a price war against China, India, or Vietnam; you have only one option: sell what others don't know how to do. Scarcity, precision, patents, trust. In short, sell very expensively, but sell something that the world is especially willing to pay for. Even what seems like a handicap can sometimes become an advantage. Take the Swiss franc, for example; for an exporting company, a strong currency can be a real problem. It makes products more expensive abroad. But this strong currency also relies on an independent central bank obsessed with price stability. As a result, while inflation soared everywhere in Europe in 2022, around 6% in France, Switzerland had around 3%. The franc makes life difficult for exporters, but it also protects purchasing power. It is a monetary shield, and it is a lever that France no longer has since it adopted the euro. Its monetary policy is decided in Frankfurt at the headquarters of the European Central Bank, which sets a single rate for about twenty countries. Bern can adjust its currency to its own economy. Paris, on the other hand, is subject to a policy designed for the entire euro zone.
And this is where the comparison with France becomes interesting, because France also has sectors capable of selling very expensively. Luxury, aeronautics, defense, nuclear, premium agri-food, cosmetics, health, deeptech. The problem is not the absence of talent. We have researchers, engineers, industrialists, powerful groups, and globally recognized know-how. The problem is that we are increasingly struggling to transform these strengths into ultra-profitable export specializations. Manufacturing industry accounts for around 9% to 10% of French GDP, compared to 18% in Switzerland. And in pharmaceuticals, the decline is dizzying. France's share of European drug exports has fallen from 20% in the early 2000s to less than 8% today. Sometimes this decline even has a face. In 2025, Sanofi ceded control of Opela, the subsidiary that holds Dolipran, to an American fund. Production remains in France. Sanofi retains a large share. But the real question is no longer whether we manufacture the boxes. It's who controls the asset, who decides the strategy. We keep the visible activity but gradually lose control. Where France produces more and cedes, Switzerland keeps its economic brain on its soil.
And this is precisely where Switzerland makes a real difference, because it has not only had large laboratories like Roche or Novartis. It has managed to keep on its territory what many countries lose over time: headquarters, decision-making centers, research, intellectual property, and high-value-added activities. Companies like Nestlé manage a global portfolio of brands from Switzerland [music], but also its research, its pricing. We can also talk about MSC, the world leader in container shipping, whose decision-making center [music] is in Geneva. A country without any coastline, but which hosts one of the global giants of maritime freight.
So, creating wealth is not enough. We must also not squander it. And perhaps this is where Switzerland has the greatest lesson to teach us, because it made one of its most important economic decisions: to impose a limit [music] on itself. We often imagine Switzerland as a naturally disciplined country, as if budgetary rigor were in its DNA. But in reality, that's false. In the 1990s, federal debt increased sharply, deficits set in, and the system began to resemble what France knows very well. We spend more than we earn, then we postpone the correction. And this is where Switzerland does something very particular. It asks the people to vote for a [music] limit. In 2001, the Swiss approved the debt brake, not just by a majority, but by 84.7%. The principle is simple: over an economic cycle, the federal government must not sustainably spend more than its revenue. In a crisis, it can incur debt, but when the economy recovers, it must compensate. This is not a campaign promise; it is a constitutional rule, and it changes everything because it makes deficits much harder to normalize. Between 2003 and 2019, Swiss federal debt fell from 25% to 13% [music] of GDP, halved, while ours exploded. The idea was so solid that even Germany copied it in 2009.
In France, debt has become [music] a permanent backdrop. In 1980, it represented about 20% of GDP. Today, it exceeds 115%. And just for 2026, the state plans to borrow 310 billion on the markets, an absolute record, and the interest burden is rising to become one of the largest budget items. The craziest thing is that France has not voted for a balanced budget [music] since 1974. For 50 years, deficit has become a habit. But the most important thing is not just the rule, but especially the way it is accepted. Because in Switzerland, votes are often held on pensions, taxes, spending, immigration, budgetary rules. And this direct democracy changes the entire relationship with the bill. When you vote for an expense, you know that one day you will also have to vote for how to pay for it. This is why some Swiss votes seem almost incomprehensible from a French perspective. In 2012, the Swiss voted on 6 weeks of mandatory paid leave. They refused. Employees refusing more vacation for themselves because they deem the cost too heavy for the economy. They also massively rejected a heavy tax on large inheritances, which concerned only a tiny minority. And in June 2026, they settled a explosive question: should the population be capped to avoid a Switzerland with 10 million [music] inhabitants? Rejected by nearly 55%, the country settled its most sensitive question with a ballot paper, and the next day it moved on.
This is perhaps the biggest difference with France. In our country, many debates last for years without ever being truly resolved. We want less debt but more spending, lower taxes but more services, more protection but less contributions. In Switzerland, the system forces you to look at the final bill. And this is reflected in one last figure, arguably the most telling of all. In 2023, 62% of Swiss people said they trusted their government. In France, it was only 34%. When you choose for yourself, you adhere. When you undergo, you are suspicious.
So, should we copy everything tomorrow? Well, not really. There are things in Swiss success that are simply out of reach. The size: 9 million inhabitants can be managed like a metropolis, not like a country of 68 million. Neutrality, which makes it the world's safe. The Swiss franc, a safe-haven currency, while France shares the euro. And let's not idealize the model. Healthcare is paid for in cash. Only 42% of Swiss people are homeowners. Poverty affects 8.4% of the population. And part of the famous GDP per capita is an accounting mirage: profits of multinationals located there for tax reasons. Swiss success [music] has a price. It is simply displayed more clearly than ours.
And this is exactly what this comparison reveals. France often gives the impression of wanting everything at once: a very protective state but falling taxes, rising salaries but competitive companies, continued debt but a returning industry, without ever clarifying the real price of each promise. Switzerland, on the other hand, forces you to look at the bill. Switzerland is not a model; it is a mirror. It has made its sacrifices visible, and its citizens accept them because they have chosen them. France has made its sacrifices invisible, and they accumulate into over 3,000 billion in debt that no one has ever explicitly voted for.
So, the real question is perhaps not "Can France become like Switzerland?" but rather "Is France still capable of looking at its own bill?" I'll let you give me your opinion in the comments. Don't forget to like and subscribe to support the channel. And if you are interested in this kind of investigation, I highly recommend my video on why work no longer pays in France, the silent decline of a country that can no longer transform effort into a future. As for the rest, we'll meet again very soon. This was Corentin. Bye!