The European Commission put the seal on an uncomfortable week for French President Francois Hollande on Friday, adding its voice to a chorus of criticism of his reforms for falling short of turning the economy around, reports Reuters.
Though it gave a guarded blessing to France's 2014 budget plans, the EU's executive arm deemed Hollande's programme to be only "partly adequate" for getting a grip on public finances.
As his poll ratings have fallen to historic lows below 20 percent, Hollande has resisted calls from ratings agencies and EU partners for strong action to make the euro zone's second-biggest economy more competitive and less dependent on state spending.
Hollande's government defends its overhaul of pensions, labour market and taxation as unprecedented in modern France, but Standard and Poor's, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and now the Commission have all said in the past week that the reforms are insufficient.
The Commission earlier this year gave France extra time to cut its public deficit to an EU threshold of 3 percent of output on the strict understanding that it makes progress on reforms.
"These will be insufficient to address fiscal and structural imbalances," it said in the draft opinion of the French reform effort which the Commission will send to France's EU's partners for official adoption.
The Commission said the pension reform did not go far enough to bring the retirement system's accounts to balance in 2020 as planned because it did not tackle public sector pensions and was based on optimistic growth assumptions.
"Schemes for state government officials and employees working in a number of state-controlled companies (are) still expected to run to significant deficits by that horizon," it noted.
It also said a spending review under way had so far delivered "only limited outcomes" and questioned whether it would generate big savings necessary for bringing down one of the highest levels of government expenditure in the world, currently around 57 percent of output.
Read more of this report from Reuters.