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The Difficult Come Back of Elderly Workers into Employment. The low employment rate of senior workers in France is mainly the consequence of pension systems and the management of non employment before retirement that create strong incentives to retire early. In this paper, it is argued that the employment of senior workers has to be increased in order to favor the employment of younger workers, contrarily to an opinion that is currently expressed in France, according to which the retirement of senior workers favors the employment of younger workers. This aim can be achieved thanks to a reform that is coordinated and that creates incentives for the firms and the workers. Such incentives rely on : changes in the pension system towards more actuarial neutrality ; activation of passive employment expenditure ; changes in the réglementations that limit the hiring of senior workers and that favor their layoffs.

An Economic Assessment of the June 2003 Common Agricultural Policy Reform. The main innovation of the June 2003 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform is to replace most market aids by a single direct payment per farm disconnected from production choices and levels (decoupling process), conditional on the respect of statutory environmental, food safety, animal health and animal welfare standards as well as good agronomic and environmental practices (cross-compliance process). This decoupled payment will be progressively reduced up to a maximum of 5 % and funds saved through this modulation mechanism will be switched from the first pillar of the CAP to a consolidated and strengthened rural development regulation confirmed as the second pillar of the CAP. In application of the subsidiary principle, important degrees of freedom are given to Member States in terms of market aids which would remained coupled and in defining cross-compliance national criteria. The objectives of this paper are the following. In a first stage, it presents the reform and proposes a qualitative analysis of measures adopted in June 2003. In a second stage, it provides a quantitative assessment of the reform for the European agricultural sector: impacts on supply, demand, exports and imports, prices, agricultural incomes, budget costs and welfare. In a third stage, the same exercise performed at the French scale allows us to give first responses to some interrogations raised by the decoupling of the income support policy. Attention is focused on three issues, i.e., land abandonment, extensification and the process of specialisation of farms and regions. We conclude by presenting our point of view on necessary evolutions of the CAP.

Is Agricultural Liberalisation a Chance for Developing Countries? To the extent that agriculture is a comparative advantage for most developing countries, liberalising agricultural trade might be beneficial for them, through new markets and heightened world prices. However, a thorough examination shows that the magnitude of these gains has often been overstated in the past. Liberalisation would entail strongly differentiated impacts across countries. Intermediate countries, like in Asia and in Latin America, are in a position to reap full benefit from liberalisation. Poorest countries, in contrast, are unlikely to reach new markets, and their foreign trade is largely shaped by trade preferences. As a consequence, they might fall short of reaping any gain from a possible agreement, unless specific measures are taken to their benefit.

Climate Stabilisation and Nuclear Expansion. This article presents the results of a dynamic simulation model of optimal allocation of primary energy res- sources. We study the viability of the nuclear capacity deployment which would allow for a reduction in atmospheric carbon release, and would maintain this pollution below a critical concentration threshold. The nuclear energy, whose fuel cycle has been expli- citly modeled, replaces the fossil sources and makes the transition between the current situation, caracterised by an intensive use of carbon energy, and a fairly distant future where the only clean renewable sources would supply the society energy needs. We exhibit the trade-off between a sensitive carbon price reduction, allowed by the nuclear expansion, and the progressive accumulation of long-lived wastes inherent to nuclear power exploitation. We show that the volume of those wastes may be significantly reduced by the introduction of breeder reactors.

Economic Performance and Convergence Process Within the Franc Zone. The aim of this paper is to analyse the macroeconomic convergence process in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU). The empirical study is related to the sigma- convergence analysis of the eight criteria which composed the WAEMU Pact of Convergence and Stability in particular the « basic » budget balance which represents the key criterion. In 1999, in accordance with the constraints of the convertibility regime of the CFA franc and the management of this common currency, the eight countries of this monetary union decided to harmonize their fiscal policy. This convergence process, which was initially supposed to be achieved in December 2003, has been deferred to the end of 2005. Our empirical results highlight an appreciable movement towards the commitment of the normative goals of the Pact. However, this institutional arrangement has recendy motivated some internal criticisms as regard to the adequacy of WAEMU with the concept ot the optimal currency area and the local poverty reduction strategy, which is not part of the fiscal package.