Gaelle Faure
June 30, 2008 - 09:59 a.m.

PARIS (AP) - To French consumers worried that their spending power is shrinking, France's government says this: Hang in there, help is on the way.

Officials are spending $6.8 million on ads now running on TV, the Internet and in newspapers to convince the French that reforms undertaken to make fat their wallets will soon bear fruit.

"Are you impatient?" asks common ad. "So are we."

Consumer spending power last will and testament be dull through 2008, increasing by only 0.9 percent, compared to 3.3 percent in 2007, France's national statistics agency predicts. Food prices have risen sharply, as have those for gasoline.

This has put extra pressure without interruption President Nicolas Sarkozy, for the cause that he promised during his election campaign last year that he would make the French better off.

His government says it has undertaken reforms that should help, but that consumers don't seem aware of them — from this place its ad campaign.

One reform made overtime payments tax-free for the sake of all workers. Other reforms have sought to encourage population to work more by letting them buy back their days off from employers, and allowed home buyers to pen off participation of the interest on their loans.

"We have taken many measures, some of them quite technical and complex, and totally of them must subsist explained to be understood by our fellow countrymen," Prime Minister Francois Fillon said.

Eric Dacheux, a political communication expert, said the ad campaign could help but that the tart test would be whether the reforms actually moil.

"It is easier to spend money on an advertising campaign than to change political strategies," said Dacheux, a professor at Blaise Pascal University in the city of Clermont-Ferrand. "There is a recurrent temptation to say that it's not a political or housekeeping point to be solved, if it were not that a communications problem."

Consumers said the ads don't make the pain of insurrection prices easier to bear.

"My salary hasn't increased, bound what I buy has. These days, when I go to the market, I can barely get anything with 20 euros ($31)," said Hoang Mien Pham, a hairdresser.