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Drug consumption and the efficiency of public policies The first part of this text is devoted to analysis of drug consumption in the United States. The second part records different experiences in terms of public policies, especially the interdiction of alcohol during the 30ths. The repression of the drug traffic leads to a rise in the prices of drugs. The hypothsesis made as to the price-demand elasticity determines the importance of crowding out consumptionn. Finally, the effectiveness of repression, according to the level of the trafficking network against wich it acts, is the subject is analysed.

The adjustment processes in walras's consumer commodities model in the mature phase of his thought This article identifies the process of equilibration in the consumer commodities model that Walras developed during the mature phase of his thought, from 1877 to about 1895. The model was poorly understood by Walras's contemporaries and has been unrecogni­zed in the present century. Attention has instead been concentrated on the model that he developed in the last phase of his thought and that has erroneously been considered to be his best work on the subject. The article shows that Walras wanted to construct a model that converges toward equilibrium by means of a pricing process in which disequilibrium transactions, disequilibrium production, and disequilibrium consumption occur. It shows also that he explored several alternative adjustment mechanisms, some of them with prices as independent variables, and others with quantities as independent variables. The article determines if the conditions that Walras considered to be parameters of his model are in fact independent of the equilibrating process, and thus arrives at a determination of whether Walras's system of equations truly describes the model.

It is possible to avoid speculative balance of payments crises ? To be made more realistic, the balance of payments crisis model has to be extended in several directions : introduction of interest paying assets and possibility for the authorities to modify interest rates : existence of speculators aiming at making capital gains and not only at protecting themselves from capital losses due to exchange rate depreciations ; intervention of non-rational investors. Once these extensions have been incorporated into the model, one can examine in which cases and using which policies balance or payments crisis can be avoided. We pay a special attention to the case of countries which don't suffer from a structural decline in competitiveness, but which, as recent events have shown, can be affected by a speculative attack on their currency.

Households'portfolio selection and low-risk assets : an evaluation of the deregulation of financial markets. Changes which have occured during the eighties in the distribution of household financial portfolio are strongly linked to the surge of short terme mutual funds (UCITS). Within a flow of funds approach, the portfolio reallocation is assumed to be the result of a supply shock. It is thus shown that this phenomenum would be still effective for many years and therefore would affect the growth rate of main monetary aggregates at the begining of the nineties.

The foundations of poor-management policies : notes on John Locke's « report on the poor » The question of a minimum income has always been under debate. Our intention here is to complement S. Milano's outline of the history of minimum guaranteed income [1990] by proposing some remarks on a central author in the history of liberalism : John Locke. It is often ignored that John Locke is also the author of a « Report on the Poor ». The ana­lysis of this report gives interesting results : on the one hand, authoritarian and hierarchical aspects in Locke's thought are stressed, and on the other hand, in our view, Locke's economic analysis of poverty are embedded in the puritan theology. Furthermore, « The Report on The Poor » raises questions of current importance.

Strategic competition and uncertainty : on the strategic value of flexibility In this paper, we show, in a framework where there is a trade-off between flexibility and pre-commitment as in Spencer-Brander 1992, that flexibility exhibits a strategic value. This strategic value of flexibility comes from its property of reducing informational benefit available to a flexible competitor. So, by choosing flexibility an incumbent may deter entry more easily than by choosing pre-commitment. In such conditions, flexibility may give rise to the whole range of entry barriers.

Financial connexions and system-actors cooperation This paper calls for the issue of cooperation among actors of different economic status. These "system-actors" — firms, "groups", "poles", and "financial cores" of an economy — are "meso-units" of different levels, that build relations of power from both sides of their organisationnal boundaries. This is indeed the case for relations of control, alliances and intermediate relations. All this calls for a notion of level specific competition that indicates the existence of as many concepts of competition as levels of analysis. Furthermore, it suggests that some relations considered as competitive at a given level could merely appear as cooperative at a higher level.