Contenu du sommaire : Whither the Economy?

Macroeconomic analysis is not just a game of equations; it is a narrative of the real. We argue in this article for a re-evaluation of the importance of narratives. Because each financial crisis is a unique event, the narrative is the natural form of analysis. In addition, the effects of economic policies can no longer be analysed independently of the narratives appropriated by economic agents (Schiller, 2017) and policy makers (Friedman and Schwartz, 1963). There is a twofold value in adding the historical dimension. Economic history is instructive by multiplying case studies, i.e. by increasing the variety of policy successes and failures analysed. History also loosens the shackles of our preconceptions, since comparing the past and present calls into question the exceptional nature of what we are living.

Economic growth in advanced countries has slowed in successive stages since the 1970s and, since the crisis, has fallen to a historical low compared with the 20th century. This slowdown is mainly attributable to weaker growth in total factor productivity. In emerging countries, the situation varies: in some countries, such as South Korea and Chile, GDP per capita have been converging for several decades; in others, such as Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, relative GDP per capita has stagnated or even declined. While weak long-term growth in these latter countries can be attributed to a lack of appropriate institutions, the widespread slowdown observed in advanced countries is more difficult to interpret. One possible explanation that we explore is the decline in real interest rates since the 1990s. A circular relationship appears to exist between interest rates and productivity: productivity determines long-term returns on capital and thereby interest rates; interest rates in turn determine the minimum productivity expected from investment projects. The decline in real interest rates, which is in part attributable to demographic factors, may have led to a slowdown in productivity by making an increasing number of unproductive companies and projects profitable. We illustrate this circular relationship using a cross-country panel regression. One way of breaking out of the circular relationship would be via a new technological revolution linked to the digital economy, or, in countries where there is still room for convergence, via structural reforms to improve the diffusion of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT).

The 2008 crisis revived doubts about growth and resuscitated the debate on secular stagnation initiated by Hansen in 1938. Particularly in a post-crisis context of zero or very low growth, Schumpeterian theory may seem to be outdated. Nevertheless, in this article, we show that it remains a valid conceptual framework.We begin by recalling the main highlights of Schumpeter's model of growth. We then argue that this conceptual framework remains relevant to many aspects of growth, notably secular stagnation, structural reforms and the debate on inequality. We show that because of creative destruction, the growth in productivity induced by innovation is underestimated. In addition, we explain why the Schumpeterian framework calls for a complementarity between structural reforms and macroeconomic policy. Finally, we show the positive impact of innovation and creative destruction on social mobility.

The “Great Recession” that began in 2008 plunged the economy into long-lasting stagnation with high unemployment, depressed output and very low inflation. This crisis, whose exceptional duration is difficult to explain using the theoretical tools of contemporary macroeconomics, invites us to enrich fundamental analysis. Conceptualizing secular stagnation is then based on the introduction of market imperfections such as credit rationing on the financial market as well as nominal rigidities on the labour market. The resulting equilibrium is characterized by the underemployment of factors of production (high unemployment, low capital accumulation) associated with a fall in prices (deflation) and monetary policy that is inactive because of the zero lower bound constraint on the key rate. In a period of secular stagnation, the impact of economic policies is affected, and many Keynesian properties appear: a deflationary impact of supply policies, ineffective conventional monetary policy and a positive effect of public spending, although limited by the crowding out of private investment.

This articles focuses on the recent research efforts to incorporate income, wage and wealth inequality in macroeconomic models. I start by reviewing recent models on the impact of inequality on, on the one hand, long-run growth and, on the other, and macroeconomic fluctuations. The articles then reviews the literature concerned with the macroeconomic determinants of wage and wealth inequality. It concludes by discussing a number of possible avenues of research that seem to me particularly important, such as the impact of macroeconomic policy on distribution or the effect that firm size can have on both growth and wage inequality.

This article examines the recent literature on macroeconomics and the environment from the perspective of the methodological approach, the questions asked and the types of responses given. It also reviews the place of the environment in textbooks and major macroeconomics journals. It shows that almost no space is given to environmental issues in short-term macroeconomics. Environmental issues are perceived as affecting the long-term and the structure of economies rather than the current situation. It can therefore be expected that studies on growth and the teaching of theories of growth would give them an important role. The article shows that while this is partly the case with regard to the literature, it does not hold at all with regard to teaching. The road ahead for truly integrating environmental issues into macroeconomics remains long.

To a large extent, environmental macroeconomics is developing outside of the theoretical debates taking place in other fields of research in applied macroeconomics. This is evidenced by the low representation of environmental issues in mainstream economics journals and in advanced macroeconomics textbooks. While the environment has not up to now been considered as a subject in itself for advancing knowledge in macroeconomics, since the 1990s it has at least been an important topic for applying macroeconomic models. These models have been used in particular to analyse and quantify the economic effects of the transition to a sustainable system of production and consumption. We propose to shed light on the state of the art in applied environmental macroeconomics. More specifically, we will endeavour to identify the specific features of this area of research that explain the theoretical and empirical choices made.

The study of macroeconomic fluctuations assumes that the behavior of the whole (aggregates) cannot be reduced to the sum of the parts (agents, markets). This is because interdependencies between markets can substantially amplify, or on the contrary dampen, shocks that at any time disturb the equilibrium. The understanding of general-equilibrium effects, on which direct evidence is limited, which are empirically blurred by multiple potential confounding factors, and for which controlled experiments are almost impossible to design, is necessarily more conjectural than the study of individual behavior or of a specific market. However, ignoring these effects because they do not have the same degree of empirical certainty as a directly observed microeconomic effect can lead to serious policy mistakes.

The article discusses three reasons for dissatisfaction with regard to the core of contemporary macroeconomics and its inability to conceive the outbreak of the Great Recession. The first comes from the excessive importance given to the demand for microeconomic foundations to the detriment of treating the problem of the aggregation and coordination of individual behaviours, an imbalance that culminates in the frequent recourse to the figure of the representative consumer. The second concerns the usurpation by this same consumer of the role of decision-maker about employment and investment at the expense of firms, simple insignificant automata on markets governed by perfect or monopolistic competition. The third involves the simplistic way in which the rational expectations hypothesis has often been applied, treating agents as observers rather than actors who create the conditions for realizing their own forecasts. These three reasons lead to arguing for a macroeconomic modelling that takes the heterogeneity of agents seriously and restores to far-from-insignificant firms a driving role in the process of making decisions about employment and investment, in a context of strategic interactions.

This article presents some recent theoretical and empirical contributions to the macroeconomic literature that challenge the perfect information hypo-thesis. By taking into account the information frictions encountered by economic agents, it is possible to explain some of the empirical regularities that are difficult to rationalise in the standard framework of full information rational expectations. As an example, we discuss how the sign, size and persistence of the estimated effects of monetary and fiscal policies can change when the informational frictions experienced by economic agents are taken into account.

The representation of macroeconomics, ostensibly rooted in microeconomic fundamentals, is that of a representative agent, equipped with perfect information, rationally anticipating the fundamental value of assets in a perfectly competitive market. In this model finance is efficient and as a corollary money is neutral. This set of assumptions makes it logically impossible to have an endogenous systemic crisis, which involves instead a generalized flaw in market coordination.An alternative foundation involves grounding macroeconomics in the mimetic competition that makes money the primary institution of the economy. In this model, coordination through finance is not based on fundamental values, but on liquidity. But the liquidity of the markets is itself the polarizing effect of a mimetic process. It is established by a market convention that is inherently unstable.As a result, the financial systems organized by markets propagate shocks according to a momentous logic produced by the interaction of indebtedness and the movement of asset prices. Its macroeconomic expression is the financial cycle. In this dynamic, the opacity of the system fuels the financial vulnerabilities that remain hidden in the euphoric phase and are revealed by the endogenous crisis in the financial cycle.The financial cycle has a considerable macroeconomic impact, through the financial accelerator, on the factors of production and the effective demand. Depending on the extent of the indebtedness and then the deleveraging within the cycle, a multiplicity of equilibria are possible.

The modern approach to macroeconomic fluctuations considers that the economy is fundamentally stable, and fluctuates around a stationary state because of exogenous shocks. This article presents some thoughts and avenues of research for a different approach in which the decentralised market economy may prove to be fundamentally unstable and thus fluctuates both endogenously and exogenously. This has implications for the conduct of macroeconomic stabilisation policies.

This article aims to contrast modern macroeconomic analysis with a non-Walrasian or evolutionary macroeconomics. This debate, which returns to the forefront with each major economic crisis, concerns the nature of coordination problems and the means of resolving them. While modern macroeconomic models describe the inter-temporal optimization behaviour of consumers who are perfectly adapted to their environment and cleared markets, evolutionary macroeconomics focuses on market imbalances that require adaptive behaviours. This contrast affects monetary and fiscal policy as well as the nature of any structural reforms to be carried out. It also affects the type of modelling to be developed.

This article discusses recent advances in agent-based modelling applied to macroeconomic analysis. I first introduce the building blocks of agent-based models. Furthermore, by relying on examples taken from recent works, I argue that that agent-based models may provide complementary or new lights with respect to more standard models on key macroeconomic issues like endogenous business cycles, the interactions between business cycles and long-run growth, and the role of price vs. quantity adjustments in the return to full employment. Finally, I discuss some limits of agent-based models and how they are currently addressed in the literature.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis macroeconomists once again took an interest in the options offered by monetary policy to deal with asset price bubbles. Empirical studies seem to show that the soaring debt of agents is more dangerous than the soaring prices of financial assets. Macroprudential tools now appear to be able to limit the amplitude of cycles of indebtedness. The debate is henceforth focusing on the last resort role left to monetary policy in cases where the implementation of macroprudential tools will not be sufficient.

We look at the euro zone's major structural difficulties and the ways to correct them. They are: the growing heterogeneity of the member countries' economies, due in particular to diverging productive specialisations and the fact that this heterogeneity is not corrected by federalism; the end of capital mobility between OECD countries; the lack of coordination of the economic policies that generate externalities between the euro-zone countries; the asymmetrical nature of adjustment mechanisms (fiscal policies, cost competitiveness), which are only implemented by the troubled countries; and the difficulty in managing fiscal policy and public debt.

The New Consensus that has dominated macroeconomics since the 1980s was based on a fundamentally neoclassical structure: efficient markets that on their own converged on a natural equilibrium with a very limited role for macroeconomic (mostly monetary) policy to smooth fluctuations. The crisis shattered this consensus and saw the return of monetary and fiscal activism, at least in academic debate. The profession is reconsidering the pillars of the Consensus, from the size of the multipliers to the implementation of reform, including the links between business cycles and trends. It is still too soon to know what macroeconomics will look like tomorrow, but hopefully it will be more eclectic and open.