Il apparaît donc à la fois nécessaire et souhaitable pour conclure notre réflexion de nous interroger sur la raison de la difficulté, voire, dans certains cas, de l’impossibilité de procéder dans le contexte français à des réformes dites « structurelles », mais qui sont en...

Les services publics de l’avenir devraient obéir à des règles générales, pour satisfaire au principe d’égalité, mais d’application particulière, de façon à mieux aider les gens dans leur vie quotidienne et satisfaire au principe d’équité. Un précepte général doit présider...

Current forecasts for Europe are currently grounded on a compromise between two alternative hypothesis, which I will describe in a stylised way. According to the first which may be called the big economy assumption, the European economy not being poisoned by structural desequilibria – the huge...

Je pense donc que, si le capitalisme a survécu, c’est précisément parce que nos systèmes sont des systèmes impurs : c’est cette impureté qui permet leur permanence. C’est cette impureté qu’il ne faut pas oublier lorsqu’on propose des réformes structurelles qui nous feraient...

There is a mounting discontent in Europe about the conduct of macroeconomic policy in the euro area and especially its policy mix, in the broad sense of the term – the combination of monetary policy, fiscal policy and structural reforms. If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the weak...

The European "sovereignty paradox" may be summarized as follows: National States and/or the European Parliament, that are the instances in which resides the democratic legitimacy to implement policies and to react to events affecting the economy, are not endowed with the instruments to act or...

The ECB has a very clear idea of what European governments should do in the name of ‘sound’ economic management: balance the budget, reduce the role of the state in the economy by cutting public expenditures; increase the flexibility of labour markets by shrinking the welfare state (see for...

The paper endorses the thesis that current macro imbalances are partly due to an excess of household savings in China, whose origin is to be found among other things in household uncertainty about the provision of public services like health care, pensions and education. Focusing on health...

It is widely agreed that the natural unemployment rate recovered strongly in several OECD economies in the 1990s while not yet in the others. This paper draws on models by the authors endogenizing the path of the natural rate in order to trace the causes and apportion the credit. The results...

Why since at least two decades macroeconomic policies have been so active in the US and so passive in Europe? I contend that social norms have changed and that the new norms call for a greater degree of inequality. Then macroeconomic policies have to be active in the United States and passive in...