Contenu du sommaire

The Outlook for the Community Budget Under Economic and Monetary Union, by Hervé Bonnaz and Philippe Mills. Economic and Monetary Union need not necessarily lead to a change in the distribution of the Community budget and would seem to be compatible with a decentralization of collective tasks such as that which currently prevails. The resulting externalities could be resolved by co-ordination or harmonization. In particular, national redistributive policies should be able to be maintained in return for the adoption of minimum standards; a hypothesis that would seem to be supported by both the theoretical arguments (redistribution should be classed as a local public good) and the existence of economic and cultural barriers limiting the free movement of pasons. The fact nonetheless remains that EMU will induce inaeased competition, which will encourage its members to be more careful about the effectiveness of their actions.

EMU and the Coordination of Budgetary Policies, by Jean Bensaid and Frédéric Gavrel. Although the Maastricht Treaty provides for extremely close co-ordination between the monetary policies of the EMU Member States, it is restricted from a budgetary point of view to regulating the level of deficit and public debt. Yet budgetary policy is the only tool available for countering a macroeconomic shock. This article uses a two-country neo-Keynesian model to show that only supply shocks pose a real problem for the co-ordination of budgetary policies under monetary union. Whether symmetrical or asymmetrical, such shocks necessarily lead to excessive public deficits. This is because the autonomy of budgetary policies prevents the governments from seeing the true inflation/unemployment arbitrage that underlies their decisions.

Monetary Policies under the EMS, by Patrick Jacq, Eric Jondeau and Frank Sédillot. The constraints imposed by the EMS and the prospects for the European Union have produced a spectacular alignment of Member States' interest rates. This alignment has been essentially asymmetric with the majority of the countries seeing Germany as the leader in monetary policy. The article first considas monetary policy in the EMS Member States before the exchange crises of 1992. It endeavours to identify the reaction functions of the different central banks, mainly through inflation/growth arbitrage and the foreign exchange constraint. The mechanism aligning the behaviour of these central banks is illustrated by positing weights that vary over time for the different goals. The article then turns to the effect of the EMS aisis on the Member States' monetary policies. In particular, it looks at which new specifications of reaction functions provide an account of the observed trend in interest rates (increased weight of the foreign exchange constraint, etc.) and it endeavours to identify the specific features of each country.

The Reserve Requirements Tool under EMU, by Peter Taubert. Following the ratification of the treaty on the European Union, some central banks have virtually renounced the reserve requirements tool (the United Kingdom and BLEU) while others, chiefly the Bundesbank, intend to maintain it. Meanwhile, in the south of the Community, the link remains to be broken between money aeation and the funding of public deficits from bank reserves. With a general trend towards lightening the reserve load, especially for deposits at market rates where banking competition is the fiacest, the reforms underway resemble the action taken by the central banks. Nevertheless, the relative weights of monetary bases and currency reserves as well as the ability to act on monetary rates remain highly unbalanced. The Treaty in no way foresees what the future reserve system might be. Yet the European System of Central Banks might eventually make up for the structural deviations in liquidity by drawing on a legal reserves market.

The Cost of Stabilizing Public Finances in Italy, by Philippe Gudin de Vallerin. This article presents a number of simulations made using the Multimod model to study the impact on the real economy of stabilizing Italian public finances. The short-term depressive effects are considerably mitigated by the credibility gains resulting from the reduced public debt and by the Ricardian effects generated by the anticipated drop in long-term tax and social security contributions. In all cases, the stabilization of public finances alone cannot completely resolve the problems of nominal alignment, especially in the context of a sharp devaluation of the lira. This observation confirms the idea that the wage agreement needs to be strictly adhered to if inflation is to be significantly reduced.

Economic Transitions: Price Changes in Russia in the 1920s, by Christian Gouriéroux and Irina Peaucelle. Russia underwent two types of transitions between 1921 and 1929. The first came about with the New Economic Policy (NEP) and took the form of a transition from a highly centralized war economy to a market economy. The second transition was an inverse development towards inaeasingly strict State control, which initially relied mainly on a prices policy for its implementation. This article consists of a descriptive analysis of retail and wholesale prices, industrial and agricultural prices and retail prices in Moscow. The aim in doing this is to establish some stable relations between these prices and find the main features of the transitions via these relations. What makes this work different is the utilization of rarely used data from Moscow's economic institute and the application of methods seldom seen in macroeconomic studies: such as moving averages, curve smoothing, and a moving presentation of variability and correlation all used here because of the erratic nature of the data.

Unemployment in Russia Two Years After Implementing the 1991 Employment Law, by Michel Sollogoub. This article reviews the unemployment situation in Russia after two years of applying the employment law of April 1991. It starts with a definition of the notion of an unemployed individual and goes on to desaibe the level, growth and structure of Russian unemployment from July 1991 to August 1993. The level is relatively low and the structure, which is specific to the Russian economy's transition period, shows the mismatch between supply and demand on the labour market.

The Growth Level in the CIS, by Gérard Duchêne. This article presents a dollar evaluation of the GDP and foreign trade of the states that have emerged from the forma USSR. These indicators are presented for Russia from 1 987 to 1 993 . Also given is an estimate of the terms of trade shock suffered by these states and an evaluation of the share of employment in the activities with negative value added. The growth in real and market exchange rates in Russia in 1992 and 1993 are compared as are the cost structures for four industrial sectors in France and in the USSR using a homogeneous classification and price system.