French Economists Research Articles

French economists and the symbolic power of (post-)national capital

French economists and the symbolic power of (post-)national capital

A Paradoxical Convergence: French Economists and the Policy toward Cartels from the 1870s to the Eve of the Great Depression

As in other industrialized countries, cartelization was widespread in France after the 1870s. Cartels, and the public policy toward them, were frequently addressed in the public debate. This article deals with the stance taken by French economists on this subject until the Great Depression. Although they were divided into several groups that were in sharp disagreement on most scientific and policy issues, French economists were almost united in their lack of support for anticartel policy. The liberal economists' opposition stemmed from their general hostility to government intervention. Unlike in the English-speaking world, where many economists otherwise critical of government gradually became supportive of antitrust after mounting evidence had revealed the scope of certain kinds of exclusionary behavior, the French liberal economists remained constant in their opposition. The more reform-minded university professors, as well as the sociologists- economists of the Durkheimian school, were unenthusiastic about policies meant to safeguard competition because they viewed “excessive” market competition as destabilizing and wasteful. Finally, the most prominent experts in industrial economics, who were employed by large companies or professional organizations, also advocated a hands-off approach, in accordance with their employers' preferences.

The Latin Monetary Union Experience (1865‒1926): French Views on Monetary Union and Lending of Last Resort in Retrospect

Abstract The Latin Monetary Union (hereafter LMU) was established in 1865 between France, Italy, Belgium and Switzerland. The agreement provided for the adoption of a common monetary base consisting of specie, and the adoption of the free circulation of gold and silver coins among them, whatever the issuing country. Despite its original goal, the minting of silver coins was subject to numerous restrictions (especially between 1874 and 1876) before being fully suspended by article nine of the convention of November 5th 1878. The necessity for a lender of last resort quickly appeared in practice, even though the 1865 convention, and its numerous amendments, did not mention it in theory. The present article looks at how the idea of the lender of last resort was discussed in the context of the Latin Monetary Union. Specifically, it focuses on two opposing views on the LMU and its problems, as adopted by French economists at the time. The article concludes that the Banque de France played a crucial role in safeguarding the LMU. Referring to Bordo’s 1990 typology of lenders of last resort, we also add a fifth type, that of converter of last resort, to characterise the specific role played by the Banque de France.

Trust in the authorities and social consolidation of society

The article examines the relationship between the phenomenon of "trust in power" and the level of socio-political consolidation of society. The starting point of the study was the publications of French economists J.Algan and P.Kayu, as well as American scientists M.Norton and R.Buell, in which the authors pointed out the relationship between the level of trust in society and the degree of effectiveness of political and socio-economic activities of the authorities. Based on the analysis of these data, the article formulates the directions according to which it is advisable to build work to increase the level of public confidence in the authorities: the manifestation of responsiveness of the authorities to people's requests; improvement of operational transparency of the authorities; current activities focused on improving people's well-being. As a point of assembly of the interests of the government and society, it is proposed to use an appropriate image of the future, which can be integrated into the system of public administration, giving it a quantitative and qualitative assessment. In this case, the proper image of the future will be a goal setting not only for the authorities, but also for citizens in the search for an optimal balance of civil-state identity. The conceptual issues of measuring the level of public confidence in the government are also considered, mechanisms for ensuring socio-political consolidation of society within the framework of a social dialogue between government, business and civil society on the basis of a regional social contract are proposed.

Growth pole policy, spatial transformation and spatial inequalities in the metropolitan areas of Romania

The recent increase of regional inequalities in Europe, and in particular in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has led to the reconsideration and revival of the “growth pole” concept in academic fields like regional economics, economic geography and spatial planning. In contrast to the classical view developed by French economists, the new policy-led approach on growth poles is emphasizing a much broader perspective. Designed for the reduction of regional inequalities, the rebirth of growth poles concept in the development planning practice triggered an important debate about the relation between spatial inequalities, economic growth and development. This article provides a critical overview and assessment of growth pole policy and spatial inequalities in Romania. The main objective is the analysis of the spatial change in the metropolitan areas of the seven growth poles by taking into consideration four groups of indicators: demographic, economic, housing and land use. The empirical results show a differentiated socio-spatial dynamic of the metropolitan areas, although being designated and treated as national growth poles. Moreover, there is no evidence for the adequateness of the growth pole spatial planning tool to its main objective: the reduction of spatial inequalities. In this case a crisis (increasing spatial inequalities and peripheralization) has not generated any transformative power in spatial planning, which rises serious doubts about the innovative capacities of the spatial development policies.

THE POLITICS OF FUNDING: THE ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION AND FRENCH ECONOMICS, 1945–1955

Following World War II, the director of the social sciences division at the Rockefeller Foundation, the industrial economist Joseph H. Willits, thought it important to extend its activities to Europe, especially France. His agenda was to strengthen institutional economics and to create modern research centers with a view to stabilizing the political situation. In the postwar decade, almost all economic research centers in France were funded by the Foundation, which helped provide greater autonomy to French economists within academia but failed to reshape French economic training and research.

French Economists Engineers and Keynes General Theory (1945-1952)

French Economists Engineers and Keynes General Theory (1945-1952)

Tugan-Baranovsky’s Business Cycle Theory and French Economists: Inspiration and Legacy

The purpose of the paper is to emphasize the contribution of Mykhaylo Ivanovych Tugan-Baranovsky to Business Cycle theory and its legacy among French economists.Tugan-Baranovsky (1864–1919), a prominent Ukrainian economist was a cycle theorist who was inspired by some French or francophone economists whose language he mastered. His theory of industrial crises proved influential upon some major economists during the first quarter of the twentieth century until the Great Depression, from Spiethoff to Hayek and Keynes.We present both the history and analytical content of industrial crises in the French version of Tugan-Baranovsky’s masterpiece. We provide an overview of Tugan-Baranovsky’s intellectual legacy as for his French-speaking followers, namely, Lescure, Aftalion, Robertson and Bouniatian. The ebb and tide of Tugan-Baranovsky’s i fluence can be understood throughout two episodes: the shift from real to monetary cycles in the interwar period and the revival of real business cycles alongside New Classical Economics in the 1980s, which proves relevant again in the context of the current Great Lockdown Recession. JEL classіfіcatіon: B14, E32, N13

The Development of Financial Economics in France between the Mid-1970s and the Early 1980s: Import or Rediscovery?

To date, little research has documented the international diffusion of financial economics. Financial economics was supposedly “introduced” in France in the 1970s. Some analysts have argued that it is an American author — Leonard J. Savage — who allowed French authors to rediscover Louis Bachelier’s work, indicating that “a prophet is not without honor, save in his own country.” The present article challenges this conventional narrative and studies for the first time how financial economics was disseminated in France between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s. It shows that, when financial economics was “imported” from the United States in France in 1970s, some pioneering French contributions have been taught for almost a century. Based on this result, the article explains why the French authors who disseminated these ideas rarely referred to the works of French forerunners. It also clarifies the role of the French economists in this process. All of this suggests that the “import” of financial economics in France was in fact a reintroduction.

The Development of Financial Economics in France between the Mid-1970s and the Early 1980s

To date, little research has documented the international diffusion of financial economics. Financial economics was supposedly “introduced” in France in the 1970s. Some analysts have argued that it is an American author—Leonard J. Savage—who allowed French authors to rediscover Louis Bachelier’s work, indicating that “a prophet is not without honor, save in his own country.” The present article challenges this conventional narrative and studies for the first time how financial economics was disseminated in France between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s. It shows that, when financial economics was “imported” from the United States in France in 1970s, some pioneering French contributions have been taught for almost a century. Based on this result, the article explains why the French authors who disseminated these ideas rarely referred to the works of French forerunners. It also clarifies the role of the French economists in this process. All of this suggests that the “import” of financial economics in France was in fact a reintroduction.

Turning the Word Upside Down: How Cantillon Redefined the Entrepreneur

The word entrepreneur originally meant someone who is active, risky, and even violent. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was used to denote a contractor who built large structures and fortifications for the government or provided supplies for the military for a contracted price but largely uncertain future costs. In contrast, Cantillon (1755) defined the entrepreneur as someone buying goods and resources at current market prices to be sold in the future at uncertain prices. His definition was adopted by the leading French economists of the time, and as a result it eventually became the common usage of the term, as will be seen in a sample of French dictionaries over time. In this remarkable and largely unrecognized transformation, Cantillon essentially turned the word upside down. Cantillon’s entrepreneur was self-regulating on the basis of profit and loss, and thus became the foundation on which he was able to construct theories and models of the market economy, which we know as economic theory. His definition is essentially that of Frank Knight and Ludwig von Mises, so it has important implications for the development of the Chicago and Austrian schools of economics.

History of an unsuccessful performance measurement innovation: surplus accounts in France (1966–c.1990)

ABSTRACT The surplus accounts method (méthode des comptes de surplus) is an accounting technique developed by French economists from 1966 onwards, at the request of the French government. It enables a business to assess the total year-on-year gain in productivity, and can also estimate how that gain is distributed between stakeholders. Despite efforts by the State, particularly by the researchers in charge of introducing the method, support from the French professional organisation for accountants, the Ordre des Experts-Comptables, and many academics, and the usefulness of the information that it was able to produce, the surplus accounts method failed to thrive. In this study, we aim to show how this method appeared, and the reasons why it disappeared.

The Contribution of Maurice Allais to Contemporary Macroeconomics: From French Planning to National Accounting

__kindeditor_temp_url__If the history of macroeconomics is still largely associated with John Maynard Keynes’ masterpiece, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Keynes, 1936), macronomics also includes a branch of economics which has gained recognition through the use of mathematical models, the notion of general equilibrium, the development of an empirical basis (applied economics), and the evaluation of the effects of economic policy. These elements of macroeconomic theory are found in Maurice Allais’ work, mainly his Théorie du rendement social (Allais, 1946) and his Fondements comptables de la macroéconomie (Allais, 1954). In the aftermath of the Second World War, Allais was able to use a corpus composed of a theory—the Walrasian General Equilibrium, a doctrine—competitive planning, an empirical basis—his work on national accounting and economic policy prescriptions, “la planification à la francaise” and monetary dynamics. This work, combined with the development of national statistics and national accounting, highlights the French tradition of economic thinking and reminds us, that in the history of economic thought, the Keynesian precepts took some time to “colonize” the minds of French economists.

Anarchism and the Hermeneutics of Faith

Anarchism and the Hermeneutics of Faith Roger Rothman (bio) M. Proudhon has the misfortune of being peculiarly misunderstood in Europe. In France, he has the right to be a bad economist, because he is reputed to be a good German philosopher. In Germany, he has the right to be a bad philosopher, because he is reputed to be one of the ablest French economists. Being both German and economist at the same time, we desire to protest against this double error. —Karl Marx, foreword to The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847 Even more than the attacks on it from the right, it has been the attacks on it from the left that have relegated anarchism to the margins of academic discourse. It appears however that anarchism's fortunes are changing. Though the casual dismissal of it as simply "some vague embrace of chaos, anti-intellectualism, or disorganized violence" is still commonplace, a more complex reception of anarchism has been developing since the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle.1 In 2002, David Graeber was among the first to propose that academics need to come to grips with the fact that "most of the creative energy for radical politics is now coming from anarchism" and that "taking this movement seriously will necessarily also mean a respectful engagement with it."2 Eight years later, Todd May declared similarly, but with a focus on anarchism's adherents, rather than detractors: "Anarchism is back on the scene. Theoretically as well as practically, anti-authoritarian thought is in a resurgence that has probably surprised many of those who have been involved in it in one way or another over the years."3 May, in fact, has proposed that we are witnessing a "third wave" of anarchist discourse (after the first [End Page 429] wave in the late 1800s–early 1900s and the second in the 1960s) (May, introduction to New Perspectives on Anarchism, 1).4 Nevertheless, what Graeber said about anarchism in 2004 is still largely true today: Most academics seem to have only the vaguest idea what anarchism is even about; or dismiss it with the crudest stereotypes. ("Anarchist organization! But isn't that a contradiction in terms?") In the United States there are thousands of academic Marxists of one sort or another, but hardly a dozen scholars willing openly to call themselves anarchists.5 Indeed, the greatest impediment to the advancement of anarchist thought is not the everyday misperception of it as a philosophy of chaos and violence but the Marxist dismissal of it as theoretically immature and naively utopian.6 For scholars like Allan Antliff and Jesse Cohn, the hegemony of Marxist thought had relegated anarchist studies to the distant margins of their respective fields (art history and literary studies). As Cohn notes, despite the recent attention to the role of anarchist thought within the development of literary history, the question of anarchism in literary theory has been "consigned to official oblivion."7 Likewise, Antliff draws attention to the fact that "for most of its [Art History's] existence anarchism in the arts has figured, if at all, as a marginal subject. … The situation has not been helped by the numerous Marxist-oriented art historians firmly ensconced in the academy who are already predisposed towards taking anarchism less than seriously or attacking it as a threat to their perspective."8 What is the source of the Marxist predisposition to dismiss anarchism as unserious? There are a number of ways to approach this question, but I propose we begin with the conflict between David Harvey and Simon Springer that erupted a few years back in "Why a Radical Geography Must Be Anarchist." There, Springer argues that radical geographers, including Harvey, have all but ignored the "anarchist tradition that thrived a century before radical geography was claimed as Marxist in the 1970s."9 Harvey, among the most influential of the Marxist geographers of the 1970s, is singled out by Springer for having persisted in defining anarchism "as nothing more than opposition to the state, while also dismissing—or at least affording little consideration to—anarchism's shared rejection of capitalism and its refusal of the institution of private property" (Springer, "Radical Geography," 250). Harvey's lengthy...

Money versus Value?

Abstract Even after the demise of the influential Uno School in the 1980s, Japanese economists have been continuously engaged in the categorial reconstruction of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy, especially the theory of value and money. Writing in the 1980s–2000s, authors of the ‘post-Uno School’, such as Ebitsuka Akira, Mukai Kimitoshi, Kataoka Kōji etc., broadened the value-theoretical views of Uno School orthodoxy to include, among others, the Neue Marx-Lektüre (predominantly H.-G. Backhaus and M. Heinrich) and the French economists C. Benetti and J. Cartelier. This paper will confront the ‘post-Uno School’s’ reading of Marx’s theory of value, which poses the theories of value and money as unreconcilable, leading them to discard the theory of value in favour of a ‘monetary approach’. We show that the dismissal of value theory leads to an introduction of Baileyan and neoclassical elements into Marx’s theory, which we believe to be both theoretically and practically precarious.

E. Claire Cage. Unnatural Frenchmen: The Politics of Priestly Celibacy and Marriage, 1720–1815.

Celibacy (the state of being unmarried) was a concern of many French economists and social commentators before and during the Revolution. Many of them believed that celibacy was becoming more and more common, partly (some argued) because increasing numbers of men avoided marriage since, in the absence of divorce, it ended only when one of the spouses died. Celibacy, they argued, was a drag on population growth (and thus harmful to the economy and the power of the state) and detrimental to morality: unmarried men were sexually active, and they not only corrupted the women they slept with but added to the growing numbers of illegitimate children. In Unnatural Frenchmen: The Politics of Priestly Celibacy and Marriage, 1720–1815, E. Claire Cage focuses on one aspect of the celibacy issue: the celibacy of priests. Although many priests of the early church married, the practice was questioned and attacked from the fourth century on, and eventually forbidden in the Western church in the twelfth. By the eighteenth century, it was an almost unquestioned doctrine that priests should not marry. Even so, there were some priestly and even more secular voices in favor of priestly marriage. The physical and emotional benefits of marriage were extolled, and Enlightenment writers such as Denis Diderot and Paul-Henri Dietrich, baron d’Holbach, condemned celibacy as “unnatural.” Others argued that married priests would be a model to their parishioners.

Institutions and the colonisation of Africa: some lessons from French colonial economics

AbstractThis paper will propose a comparative analysis of the conceptualization of colonisation that could shed light on the contemporary economic analysis of the colonial legacy in Africa. More specifically, this article will propose a return to old debates on colonisation, with a special focus on French 19th century political economy. Three main institutionalist lessons can be drawn from a careful analysis of French colonial economics of the 19th century. First, by institutions, the authors referred not only to the modes of colonisation – liberalism or collectivism? – but also to the actors: What should be the respective role of states and of private actors (entrepreneurs, banks, settlers) in the colonisation of Africa? Second, the colonial debates involved a discussion of property, whether in the sense of land ownership (individual vs. collective) or under the prism of property rights. Third, the analysis of the colonisation of Africa by French economists reveals an understanding of institutions as cultural values, norms or even racial attributes.

Orthodox Finance and “The Dictates of Practical Expediency”: Influences on Matsukata Masayoshi and the Financial Reform of 1881–1885

Orthodox Finance and “The Dictates of Practical Expediency”Influences on Matsukata Masayoshi and the Financial Reform of 1881–1885 Steven J. Ericson (bio) In 1880–1881 the Japanese government embarked on a pivotal program of financial stabilization that came to bear the name of Matsukata Masayoshi 松方正義 (1835–1924), who brought the program to fruition after he became minister of finance in October 1881. The aim was to deal with the severe inflation and paper-currency depreciation that had begun in 1878–1879 with the issue of huge amounts of inconvertible (fiat) paper notes by the government and U.S.-style “national banks.” Under Matsukata, the government accelerated the retirement of unbacked notes and the accumulation of specie reserves, raising the necessary funds mainly by privatizing state enterprises, hiking consumption taxes, and floating domestic bonds, as well as directly acquiring specie by underwriting exports. By January 1886, the regime had succeeded in establishing a sound, silver-backed currency system centered on the Bank of Japan, founded by Matsukata in 1882.1 Often hailed as the “Alexander Hamilton of Japan,”2 Matsukata was perhaps the only leader of the Meiji period who consistently advocated “orthodox” monetary and [End Page 83] fiscal policies in the late 1870s and early 1880s, although his predecessors as minister of finance, Ōkuma Shigenobu 大隈重信 (1838–1922) and Sano Tsunetami 佐野常民 (1822–1902), actually introduced most of the measures for whose origination Matsukata has usually received credit.3 In Matsukata’s thinking, the practice of “financial orthodoxy” meant, above all, the pursuit of policies (1) to restrain spending by the central government and generate adequate revenue for it, thereby enabling it to balance the national budget or, better yet, create a budget surplus and (2) to establish and maintain a stable, national currency backed by specie—a hard currency with paper money convertible into silver or gold coins. By the time he succeeded Sano and started fully implementing those measures in late 1881, Matsukata had come to embrace financial orthodoxy based on multiple influences: his pre-Restoration study of ancient Chinese and early modern Japanese financial reforms, his experience as an official in the new Meiji government, and his exposure to Western ideas and precedents in the 1870s. According to the prevailing view, as finance czar Matsukata rigidly applied the theories of orthodox finance he had learned from French economists during the nine-month trip he took to Europe in 1878.4 Some historians likewise claim that French scholarship and example provided the overall pattern for the Matsukata reforms of the 1880s.5 Contrary to this interpretation, however, French tutelage for the most part simply reinforced ideas that Matsukata had been developing since the Restoration, drawing on both Sino-Japanese and Western sources, and that he would go on to implement pragmatically after 1881. Granted, he and his subordinates in the Ministry of Finance did rely heavily on the French recycling of classical British liberal economics. Yet what they found attractive about this French rendering was not its free-trade or laissez-faire prescriptions but its down-to-earth, policy-oriented views on monetary and fiscal matters. As I conclude in this article, Matsukata and his brain trust had no single model for financial reform; rather, they participated in a global circulation of ideas and practices regarding public finance. [End Page 84] The set of policies that Matsukata put into effect, building on his predecessors’ initiatives, amounted to a self-imposed, nineteenth-century antecedent of modern structural adjustment programs, which have included debt reduction through higher taxes and lower government spending, currency stabilization, privatization of state-owned enterprises, and creation of new financial institutions. Mark Metzler has in fact called the Matsukata financial reform the world’s first such program.6 In the West in the 1870s and 1880s, most of these measures, with laissez-faire and free competition in place of the late-twentieth-century strategy of privatization, would have fallen under the rubric of orthodox financial and economic policies. The underpinnings of such policies were largely developed by British classical economists beginning with Adam Smith (1723–1790) and his cohort, who elaborated the concept of laissez-faire that French Physiocrats had introduced earlier and, most importantly for financial...

L’analyse du déclin dans la seconde moitié du xix e siècle

Les économistes français de la seconde moitié du xix e siècle ont abordé la question du déclin de la France dans une approche démographique et comparative avec l’Europe. Il ressort de leurs analyses un lien très fort entre déclin démographique et déclin économique. Paradoxalement, une des solutions privilégiées pour lutter contre ce déclin, toujours dans une approche comparative, est de lier les conditions du dynamisme économique et du dynamisme démo graphique aux projets d’expansion coloniale. Le Royaume-Uni représente à leurs yeux un exemple type de cette interprétation du déclin économique et des solutions retenues.

Cyril Hédoin's L'institutionnalisme historique et la relation entre théorie et histoire en économie [Historical institutionalism and the relation between theory and history in economics]. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013, 435 pp.

Review of Cyril Hedoin's L'institutionnalisme historique et la relation entre theorie et histoire en economie [Historical institutionalism and the relation between theory and history in economics]. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013, 435 pp.This book originates from Cyril Hedoin's doctoral work on institutionalism in economic thought. It supplies extensive knowledge on the founding figures of institutional economics (Gustav von Schmoller, Max Weber, Thorstein Veblen, John R. Commons, and Karl Polanyi), which makes it a potential textbook on the subject, and it provides a detailed analysis of what defines an authentically institutionalist to economics (p. 9). Because economists can say we're all Institutionalists now (p. 7, emphasis in the original), the author reflects on the identity of what he and other French economists call historical institutionalism-a research programme that is distinct from (and critical of) mainstream economics and its method of analysing institutions. The adjective 'historical' not only refers to an approach that emphasizes the history of economic thought, but also suggests the specific criterion of demarcation used by Hedoin to identify the essence of this heterodox institutionalism. This approach recognizes the importance of the historicity of social phenomena and of social knowledge, and therefore investigates the relation between theory and history. This book also contributes to the history of ideas, the philosophy of economics, and the economics of institutions.By using two categories of Imre Lakatos's methodology of science, Hedoin proposes a rational reconstruction of the thought of Schmoller, Weber, Veblen, Commons, and Polanyi in order to delineate the hard core of the research programme of historical institutionalism. The choice to concentrate on these five authors (thus avoiding the reduction of historical institutionalism to American institutionalism) is based on their importance for this research programme: they are representative of its identity and offer significant insights that relate theory and history which, for the main part, are convergent and often complementary. Hedoin interprets these authors by analysing the logical connection between theory and history: specifically, this refers to the epistemological issue of historicization of theory (i.e., the method of social knowledge) and the substantive issue of theorization of history (i.e., the explanation of historical dynamics). The book is structured according to these mirror issues in order to analyse the primary methodological and theoretical principles that characterize historical institutionalism.Part one of the book develops what Hedoin identifies as the three principles underlying the historicization of theory: (1) consideration and treatment of the problem of historical specificity (this addresses the tension between the general and the particular); (2) adoption of methodological institutionalism (this addresses the tension between action and structure); and (3) appeal to abduction and ideal types as methods of knowledge (this addresses the tension between concept and reality). Hedoin begins with an exploration of the philosophical foundations of these principles which have their basis, according to him, in German neo-Kantian philosophy (Wilhelm Dilthey, Heinrich Rickert) and American pragmatist philosophy (Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey). Although there are differences between these philosophical traditions, they share a common emphasis on the historicity of science, which opposes the positivist epistemology that has dominated economics. Neo-Kantianism is, Hedoin states, the first philosophy to deal with the relation between theory and history; it addresses the specificity of the cultural sciences and aims to establish their scientific legitimacy. Pragmatism makes a decisive contribution (p. 63) by articulating connections between its theory of knowledge and its theory of action; these connections underlie all three principles for historicizing theory, especially in the social sciences. …