An accounting framework used to draft the french financial policy : the Tfe, by François Champarnaud, René Isnard, Jean-Jacques Santini.
This article presents an accounting framework created to analyze and draft the French financial policy: the rocalled Tableau de financement de l'économie (Tfe). This framework was completed together by the Direction de la Prévision and the Direction du Trésor in the years 1982-1983, in other words at a time of high growth in the public and external deficits, the aim being to quantify the amount of the latter, assess the impact and limit sideslipping. It thus meets empirical concerns and is built for operational ends.
The Tfe strive to reconcile the macro-economic approach of the financial sphere (as expressed by the Tables of financial operations) with the micro-economic information provided by the Direction du Trésor relating to agents under its authority or markets it analyzes (square tables). For this purpose, statistical reclassification of the nomenclatures and agents has been made.
The above defined framework and calculated series enable analyzing the evolution of the French financial system. A description is thus given of the evolution of the weight of public borrowers, investment behaviours, and the level and the nature of financial intermediation. The Tfe also and above all set out to forecast the main financial evolutions of the current and following year, and they thus form the main tool to obtain coherence in the economic and financial policy decisions. In this respect, the Tfe enabled detecting such imbalances in time, and facilitated in particular the introduction of a financial policy setting out to absorb them (growth of the securities market, decline in external financing, stabilization of the public sector borrowing requirement), as well as major structural evolutions (decompartmentalization of markets).
Drafted in a period of return to health, these tables have met the requirements of tight steering in the financial sphere. They must today give rise to a new approach to the economic policy since the latter is moving away from the traditional customs in France of direct supervision and quantitative containment.
JEL. 310