Réalité et déboires de l'espace conjoncturel européen : une régulation sans croissance ?

Abstract

The history of the industrial capitalism shows the formation and the disintegration of economic spaces, whose national short term cycles are correlated strongly. The strengthening of such an space in Europe is enhanced by recent studies. In this paper, the precise study of the correlation between French and German cycles, over the last thirty years, shows it is not a completely new phenomenon. These cycles are synchronised strongly, because they follow from common internal and external demand impulses. But, until the beginning of the nineties, the correlation of the internal private demands, not the one of the public demands, contributes to that synchronisation. The present fiscal convergence can constitute an important change, if it induces the persistent synchronisation of the public impulses. The correlation between the European and American cycles has a double nature. It mixes impulse and crowding out effects of the American growth over the European economy. The crowding out effects are caused by the competition between American and European exportations and by the financial asymmetry between the two zones. They produce frequent cyclical lags between United States and Europe. The regionalization of the European economic activity is based on strong commercial interdependences, which surpass the internal divergence forces (as the exchange rates fluctuations). But it does not mean an increased European independence of the monetary and financial American influences. This double reality induces questions about the conditions of an common European short term policy, whose objective could be the collective access of the European countries to their potential growth path.