The Lisbon Agenda and the Relocation of Economic Activities Abroad unemployment insurance genuinely oriented toward a return to employment. Other essential factors are a flexible salary system and an education and training system that facilitates labour mobility. By contrast, some trade unions argue that far too much fault has been laid at the door to what was generally called“too rigid” labour markets in Europe. For them, adaptation is possible also with existing labour market policies where there is effective social protection and substantial social regulations that give the state a clear role. The labour force needs to be sufficiently flexible and capable of retraining. Lifelong training is needed but that was nothing new. The ILO has pronounced itself in favour of a flexible and permanently learning workforce for decades. Furthermore, the European Union has structural funds at its disposal and these should be used more widely. The trade unions' view is that it is wrong to say that wages are not flexible when in fact they have been so for the last decade. Policy makers should be engaged in a discussion as to how to assist people who lose their jobs. The classic solution has been to organise untargeted social protection so as not to favour any particular category of the unemployed. Experience shows, however, that countries where policies have been more precisely targeted have fared better. It is, however, very difficult to identify any one miracle solution. Rather, several policies will have to be conducted jointly so that people that are disadvantaged by a policy in one field can find compensation in another. It is also important to reach synergy between macro-economic policies and employment policies that help capital and labour to transfer from declining sectors to up-coming ones. The volume of the benefits to the source country and company resulting from relocating jobs to more favourable foreign destinations depends principally on the following factors: the level of cost savings, the level of profits repatriated from the outsourced investment, the number of workers that can be re-employed in new jobs created in the source country with the aid of the increased profits, and the increase in sales to the outsourced production outlet. A comparison by McKinsey Global Institute of off-shoring investment made by US and French companies revealed that the reasons behind the lower gains made by French companies were related to the fact that French companies invested more heavily in North Africa and Eastern Europe, where cost savings were less than was the case in India, where US companies invested relatively more. Moreover, French companies did not reap as much profit from investing in off-shoring centres abroad as did US companies, and they sold less of their intermediate products to 157