Contenu du sommaire : Dossier. International macroeconomics

This paper analyses the formation of a new European government, that of the euro, built for a large part at the margins of the EU common institutional framework. The paper therefore considers the related process of the transformation of Europe (that is, the EU and the Member States) as a “€-ization of Europe”, defined along three dimensions: the emergence at its core of a powerful pole of (national and European) treasuries, central banks and financial bureaucracies; the consolidation of an ever tighter system of European surveillance of national economic policies; and the progressive re-hierarchization of Europe's economic and political priorities around the objectives of financial stability, budgetary balance and “structural reform”. In doing this, the article suggests a new problematization of the nature of the “constraints” that the government of the euro has set on the economies of Member States: less legal than socio-political; less external than diffuse and immanent; and ultimately connected to the brokering position acquired by the network of financial bureaucracies in defining Europe's economic problems and policies.JEL codes: N15, N25, O53

The increase in available data on consumer characteristics and behaviour together with the augmentation of processing capacity using algorithms is opening the way for the development of third-degree tariff discrimination strategies with extremely fine granularity. While the effects of this quasi-first degree discrimination on the total surplus are ambiguous, they are also inducing a transfer of well-being between economic agents. This article analyses the possibility of implementing such strategies in the digital economy and considers the possible responses of legal experts establishing the rules on competition as well as of the consumers themselves.

This paper presents the state of progress of a French international trade dataset called the "Base Montesquieu", which is focused on products. It includes the foreign trade data contained in the annual series entitled "Tableau général du commerce de la France avec ses colonies et les puissances étrangères sur la période 1836-1938" [Table of France's general trade with its colonies and foreign powers over the period 1836-1938]. The article presents the data and discusses their robustness. It also analyses the issues associated with the digitization and conversion of this source into a database in order to make them available to researchers.JEL code: N7

China is on the right track for undertaking ambitious reforms announced at the 19th congress. Growth strengthened in 2017 amidst fiscal tightening and prudent monetary policy, though the trade war entailed temporary disturbances in late 2018. The shift from quantitative to qualitative growth in the coming “New Era” does not depend on present geopolitical uncertainties in its orientation. The long-term restructuring of the economy that is investigated in this article, including the project for a new paradigm of globalization to 2050, can be read without worrying too much on the vagaries of present US policy.China enters a new era because the main contradiction that drives development has changed. The former contradiction was the scarcity of goods and services produced in the economy, which entailed poverty and required enforced industrialization to get people out of it. Since moderate prosperity is to be achieved, the main contradiction lies in the imbalances generated by past and present development.Promoting the quality of growth aims first and foremost at reaching the technological frontier through innovation (digital economy, new energies and networks). It aims also at restructuring cities to achieve a harmonized urban/rural development in rethinking mobility. Migrants between countryside and cities should be able to carry their social rights.To achieve its promise of prosperity in the socialist economy, the core reform on the demand side is centralizing social security, unifying retirement regimes and reforming the tax system to reduce the disparities between regions. Public goods must be delivered all over the countries through taxes and transfer mechanisms, so that less-favored regions are not forced to indulge in excessive indebtedness to provide the common goods and services that people are entitled to use.The “New Era” has also a worldwide dimension. Recovering great power status under the full restoration of the Middle Empire for the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the People's Republic of China is an ambition to be fulfilled in restructuring the world economy according to the mammoth project “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR). It intends to be a new concept of globalization.OBOR opens opportunities to recipient countries that are infrastructure-constrained, because their lack of public goods is undermining their development. Conversely, it is the right platform to push China's soft power across Eurasia with strengthening economic linkages through trade, capital flows and construction deals. The OBOR initiative will succeed with Asian integration, since China will become the first world economic power before 2030. It is why the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) complements OBOR.

What are the relationships between country size, economic growth and business cycle volatility? To investigate this question, we developed an original country-size index with principal component analysis. Traditional analysis usually equates country size with population. Our methodology enables to simultaneously consider several factors constitutive of country size: population, GDP and arable land. These additional variables allow us to capture different components of the country size and to control for more than a demographic effect. Using a panel data set of 163 countries for 1960–2007, we find, contrary to Rose (2006), that country size has a significant and negative correlation with economic performance. Our results for output volatility extend the negative and significant relationship found by Furceri and Karras (2007). In addition, we present differentiated results for small and large countries, OECD members, eurozone countries and the so-called BRIC countries.JEL Codes: E42; F36; F42.

World public debt has increased by 30% of world GDP between 2007 and 2017. During the same period, the real interest rate on public debt has fallen by roughly 200 basis points, whereas it should have increased by 100 basis points according to previous estimates. It reveals that demand for public debt has increased faster than supply. Where does the increase in savings come from? To answer this question, we construct the world financial market equilibrium to identify the country and agents across countries who increased their saving rate. Using the equality between the sum of private and public saving and investment at the world level, we find four lessons. First, the world investment rate has been slightly increasing during the period, with an impressive shift of investment to China. The investment rate of China was 4% of world GDP in 2007. It jumps to 12% in 2017. Second, during the period, the world experienced an impressive reduction of global imbalances. The Chinese saving rate increased less than Chinese investment and the US saving rate increased more than US investment. Third, the increase in the world saving rate comes from highly indebted countries before 2007, mostly from the US and southern Europe. The increase in the current account of Italy, Spain and Greece (from a negative territory) is the order of magnitude of the increase in the US current account. Fourth, there is no clear relationship between the household saving rate and national government borrowing, thus not confirming the Ricardian equivalence view. Finally, it seems that the factors generating a high net saving rate in China are temporary, whereas the deleveraging of US and southern Europe may be long-lasting. As a consequence, one can expect low interest rates for a long period of time.JEL codes: E21, E44, D91, D31.