The key economic fact in the article is that the markets in France have not been seriously affected.
International investors are not altruists. They invest where they can make money and do not give a damn about the underlying political structures so long as they can keep making money.
France does not now have the CPE, and foreign investment has been rolling in anyway. The government proposed the CPE, it has been rejected after political turmoil...and markets were not affected. Now, you have some big internal partisans for CPE waving the bloody flag and screaming about how nobody will invest in France.
But the truth is that foreign investment in France was robust before the CPE under the current laws, and the markets were not affected by the dispute, and foreign investment is not going pour out just because the French opted to maintain the status quo.
The capital investors worldwide don't care about the CPE.
It was a bad law, and it's gone now, and it won't make a difference. French economic growth remains on track at about 2% for 2006. All of the screaming and yelling is political, not economic.
International investors are cold-blooded rational capitalists who care about the bottom line. And the bottom line is that the CPE was, is, and will remain irrelevant to them. France is still a good place to make money, so they will continue to invest there, as before.
The political classes on all sides will wave the bloody shirt some more, no doubt, and predict meltdown and The End Of The World As We Know It, but the capitalists who actually make the markets are not impressed.
I have a slight quibble. True, CPE does not yet exist so investment in France is no worse now than before. But general unemployment of 11-12% and youth unemployment of 20% does indicate serious under-investment in the French economy largely because of it's extreme pro-labor, anti-business national agenda for the last several decades.
It's like the USA was in the 1950s. You were either pro-labor or pro-business, not both. Perhaps it was the brilliance of 401-k plans that made investors out of tens of millions in the workforce that helped us see in simple terms that healthy vibrant businesses are the only secure source of good jobs and full employment.
Then a European economic expert claimed that the rate of foreign investment has slowed down in France.
I have difficulty sorting out what is going on. You seem to point a rosier picture than even the leftwing pundits believe.