Contenu du sommaire

Fiscal Policy in United Kigdom, by Jean-Jacques Santini. Since the second World War British economic policy, largely based on Keynesian theory, has relied essentially on fiscal policy to regulate the economy. Since the beginning of the 1970s many observers have cast a critical eye on this approach and on the almost uninterrupted increase of the weight of public sector in the economy, which presumably explains most of british economic problems. The coming to office of the Conservative party in May 1979 strenghened the pervasive influence of this school of thought. Reducing public deficits and the role of the State in the economy have since become the top priorities in British economic policy. The aims of the present study are to analyse the broad outlines of this strategy, taking due account of the specific institutional context of the United Kingdom and to caractenze the dynamics of the major budget outlays for almost twenty years. Despite major reforms affecting a large number of British institutions (privatisation, local council autonomy...), the role and content of fiscal policy and the increase in taxation and expenditure have only been slightly curbed. However, the full impact of these reforms cannot be assessed yet. The share of the public sector in the economy should decline in the coming years under the infuence of various factors such as large-scale privatisation or reduced government intervention, with the resulting repercussions on budgetary dynamics.

Telephone charges : a sweeping reform, by Jean Le Foll. Several factors have brought about modifications in telephone call charges since 1981 : taxation to support the general budget, the Post Office and the electronic industries, charge variation according to the time of day, charging for local calls according to duration... Are these modifications part of an overall policy to bring call charges into line with the cost of the services provided ? The author attempts to answer this question and explain, which major considerations may determine future changes. He starts by quoting examples of distorted charges in various industrialized countries and also the results of a recent survey carried out by the Ptt administration to assess the importance of the revenue transfers generated by telephone call charges. He goes on to describe the situation in France, where the telephone service is run as a State monopoly, and then looks at the international trend towards deregulation, the first example of which was the dismantling of Att in the United States. The overall trend in revenues and particularly the general level of call charges lead to two remarks : on the one hand the undeniable economic and social value of this activity rules out any idea of raising prices to the exitent of restricting the demande for it, while on the other hand, the recent introduction of new taxation calls for an in-depth study on whether the French telecommunications service should be subject to common law company taxation like any other company. The main points developed in the article concern call charge structures and the different parameters which should influence them. First of all the various types of services provided and the equipment used (lines, exchanges, subscriber lines) and above all the four basic components of charge rates and revenues : the time, date, distance and duration of the communication. Further progress must still be made with regard to call charge scales for calls made at different times of the day, but lowering the prices of trunk calls and increasing those of local calls are two reforms which are already underway and which will have the farthest-reaching effects on transfers between subscribers on the behaviour of the different economic agents concerned. The article concludes by giving an idea of the order of tarif modifications required to bring costs and charges more or less onto the same plane : a reduction of trunk call charges by one half or two thirds and a sharp increase in local call charges.

An internal analysis procedure of macroeconometric multinational models: presentation and application to the R.C. Fair's model, by Jean-Pierre Laffargue. This paper introduces a new evaluation procedure of multinational models and gives an application to the multi-country system which has been built by R.C. Fair. The first step is to modify the numerical values of parameters in order to make all the countne's structures similar (i.e. only differing in size). Then the consequences of economic policy can be allocated between a world and a differential component. These components are independent and it is easy to give them an economic interpretation. In the following steps, countries' structural specificities are progressively remtroduced. Simulations show how these peculiarities change the results which have been obtained in their absence. These modifications then receive economic interpretations.