France’s Socialist government has commissioned experts to produce a 10-year gameplan for overhauling areas such as public spending and education in keeping with its strategy of pursuing gentle, incremental reforms.

Responding to criticism that he has been slow to embark on structural changes and lacks a big-picture vision, President Francois Hollande wants ideas on his desk by year-end for sprucing up industry and slimming down the welfare state.

“The point of this is to leave behind the silo mentality we’re in today and think more broadly,” said Jean Pisani-Ferry, a prominent economist and scholar whom Hollande has appointed chief of a new economic policy planning body.

Building on a May labour reform and a pension bill headed to Parliament in October, the aim is to link structural reforms in areas like education, housing and workplace training rather than looking at French problems in a piecemeal way, he said.

It will look in particular at France’s competitiveness lag and assess the impact of a tax credit scheme for companies introduced late last year that Pisani-Ferry said had failed to reduce labour costs as much as the government had hoped.

“The European landscape is evolving very fast in terms of relative competitiveness,” Pisani-Ferry said in a meeting with a small group of reporters. “France’s problems have not been resolved by the measures taken so far.”

He said the panel would bring in people from civil society as it looks at which industrial sectors should be invested in to match changes in global consumption as rich-world growth subsides and the developing-world middle class balloons.

Pisani-Ferry said Hollande would use the plan, which would contain detailed numerical objectives, as a basis for future reforms.