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The last ten years — from 1983 to 1993 — show a strong continuity of the French macroeconomic policies : «rigour», and then competitive disinflation, with the objective of improved international competitiveness and credibility for the French economy. The paper proposes a critical valuation of these policies and analyses the factors who give rise to a disappointment concerning their ability to satisfy the needs of employment : relative failure of the economic and social modernisation; structural shortsightedness and instability of the financial system ; vulnerability and crisis of the European unification. It analyses finally the difficult definition of a convenient short term policy by the new French government in a depressive and deflationnist context.

This paper attempts to describe the main characteristics of monetary and financial economics since recent researches undertaken into this field of analysis borrow several concepts initially used in papers dealing with industrial or technological economics. Two main theoretical and analytical orientations are discussed. On the one hand, some approaches consider banks as firms, so that profit and cost functions have to be determined in order to understand the way of functioning of such institutions. On the other hand, papers dealing with the question of financial innovations often enlighten this aspect of financial theory using lessons from studies concerned with the problem of emergence and diffusion of industrial innovations. The results of this methodology are appreciated keeping in mind the belief according to money is a specific asset. Such an assumption permits then to show that using notions developed in industrial economics is a positive way of reasoning since it induces a better understanding of financial and credit mechanisms; but this approach requires to put the accent on the own characteristics of monetary and financial assets.

In this paper it is suggested that the high level of aid per capita received by small island countries and territories (population of less than 1 million), and their often very large trade deficit with the rest of the world, can only be explained by their international specialization on the export of geo-strategic services to large industrial aid donor countries. This is a non market public export, and as such does not appear in trade statistics. Small islands receive much more aid per capita than continental Third World countries, because they have a comparative advantage in this kind of «geo-strategic» exports. They can be, because of their privileged geographical location, actual or potential military bases, military testing centers (nuclear testing, missile testing), or political and cultural influence outposts in a remote region. In addition, the cost of securing their political allegiance is relatively small, so that per capita aid can be rather large and make a big difference to the islanders, at a relatively moderate total cost to the donor nation. Using a two countries, two commodities model of international trade, it is possible to show how both countries will gain from trade when the small island exports non market public geo- strategic services (possibly using local labor resources for this purpose), while importing from the donor country private goods, financed by aid or transfert payments. This is because in the donor country, there is a comparative advantage in the production of the private goods, while in the small island country, there is a comparative advantage in the export of non market public geo-strategic services : it pays for the donor countries to « import » such services, rather than, for example, allocate more resources domestically to the production of nuclear submarines or aircraft carriers to compensate for the lack of a good network of actual or potential military outposts around the world. The smaller the population of the island, the lower the cost to obtain this export, the higher the demand price the large industrial country will be willing to pay in aid per capita to the small island. This explains why there is an inverse relationship between population and aid per capita to small islands. An other conclusion of the model is that the international geo-strategic outlook will affect the amount the large industrial country is willing to pay for geo-strategic exports : the « collective indifference curve» of the donor nation between the public «military» geo-strategic good and the private «civil» good will move toward preference for the latter when, as is the case today, the threat of a conflict with other nations from trade between the island and the big industrial nation will get smaller, the negociation on the amount of aid will become more difficult, and in some cases the «trade» might cease altogether.

The French family policy aims both to redistribute incomes and to favour births. To study the impact the family benefit could have on a couple's decision to have an additional child, we assumed the existence, for each household, of an «income-threshold»: after balancing its material aspira- tions against its desire of having a child, a couple decides of a particular level of income under which having a child would be unacceptable for economic reasons. The income threshold was calculated from the Lorraine Household Panel Study data. The experimental verification showed that couples who had an additional child were above their income threshold and that the family benefit's impact is connected with the child's rank and with the household's

The Kondratieff cycle has been put back in the forefront for two decades now by the contemporary crisis, whose structural and durable character is more than ever perceptible. This cycle is, however, now as in the past, still deeply controversial. The object of this paper is not to take stock of the present state of the debate and of the questioning on this topic, but, more modestly, to draw attention to a few fundamental problems relative to the field of investigation that has been constituted around this set of problems. In fact, it seems that the reflection concerning the long cycles of capitalist growth leaves in abeyance numerous questions unanswered or at least insufficiently taken into account in contemporary explanations. Five points are tackled one after the other : the question to know whether the fluctuations of the Kondratieff type are proper or not to the era of industrial capitalism; the problem of the enumeration of the different types of economic fluctuations; the question of «longterm prices» and the dating problem, with regards to the periodicity and cyclical nature of the move- ments ; lastly, the questions of wars. The idea, which is finally formulated, is that the credibility of the set of problems concerning long cycles depends more than ever on giving clear and coherent answers to these questions.

The purpose of this article is an investigation into the theoretical foundations of Marshallian industrial dynamics, based on research work more specifically dedicated to the industrial district. This will lead us to an analysis of a process of change in an economy out of equilibrium. First we will examine the main lines of this revival, putting particular stress on the aspects relating to productive dynamics. The foundations of Marshallian industrial dynamics will then be studied through reflections devoted to the industrial district in which Alfred Marshall analyses the creation of specific resources. Finally we will show that the Marshallian analysis of industrial district lays the foundations on an analysis of irreversibility and path-dependency, which constitutes today the starting point of theoretical research devoted to the dynamics of location and the localized processes of growth.