Contenu du sommaire : Mélanges

Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) Health Check : Should There be Exceptions to The General Treatment ? Successive reforms of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy since 1992 have sought to (1) decouple agricultural income support from production and (2) target the support to the provision of agricultural public goods. This change is nearly complete in the crop sectors but only partial in the livestock sectors. We analyze different decoupling options for the livestock sectors in the context of the CAP Health Check. Our simulations with a European computable general equilibrium model show that total decoupling will have modest impacts on the livestock sectors and markets, mainly thanks to the preservation of import tariffs.

Can French Local Governments Restore their Financing Capacity ? Lessons of the APUL Macroeconomic Model Since 2004, French local governments have been running deficits and have moved deeper into debt, making it harder for general government to comply with the fiscal rules of the Maastricht and Amsterdam Treaties. The growing concern over the local governments' fiscal sustainability calls for a sounder understanding of their fiscal behavior. Our paper provides anew macroeconomic model of French local government finances consistent with the “golden rule” imposed on every local government in the country. The model assumes that local budgets are prepared under the hypothesis of tax-ratestability and are balanced through a trade-off between investment expenditures and borrowings. Our empirical estimates of the model for the period 1978-2003 confirm the theoretical assumption. We run the model through various ex ante and ex post simulation exercises. The first result confirms that in a context of moderate economic growth, moderate inflation,and interest rates, French local-government budgets are likely to reach equilibrium by 2010. The simulation exercises also confirm (1) the pro-cyclical behavior of local fiscal policy, as the acceleration of economic growth increases the budget surplus or reduces the deficit ; (2) the positive net effect of higher interest rates on local fiscal positions, as the dampening effect of weaker investment demand exceeds the rise in interest payments ; (3) the negative effect of an increase in prices of investment goods relative to GDP prices.

Economic Impact of Growth of Private Labels In this article we survey the economic literature on private labels (PLs). The first section looks at PL growth. We analyze the causes of private-label introduction by retailers and its impact on manufacturers and consumers. We compare our conclusions with the findings of empirical studies. The third section discusses PL positioning. The fourth section examines the link between PLs and retailers' loyalty programs. The fifth section addresses the issues for manufacturers resulting from PL introduction. We conclude with some thoughts on PLs and their impact on social welfare. Keywords : industrial organization, vertical relationships, private labels, food industry

Growth and Long-Tern Unemployment This article studies the long-term relationship between labor productivity growth and unemployment. Measures ofco-movements in the frequency domain indicate that the relationship is strongly negative for the seven countries studied :United States, Canada, Japan, United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Germany. We show this empirical relationship to be consistent with an efficiency wage model.

Describing the Economic Cycle In Tunisia This article describes the business cycle in Tunisia – in terms of the “classical cycle” and the “growth cycle”– and characterizes its main regularities. We find that : (1) classical-cycle contraction phases are heterogeneous and triggered mainly by external shocks ; (2) supply shocks, unrelated to demand shocks, are the chief determinant of economic activity fluctuations ; (3) Tunisian growth-cycle regularities differ from those observed in Morocco and Jordan ; (4) the Tunisian growth cycle is weakly synchronized with those of Jordan and Morocco, owing to a strong idiosyncratic component and a low common-shock weight.

A Probabilistic Indicator of The Acceleration Cycle in The French Economy We describe a new coincident probabilistic cyclical indicator developed by the Banque de France in order to detect, on a monthly basis, the turning points in the French economy's acceleration cycle. The indicator is based on the methodology of Markov-switching models and uses the Bank's monthly business survey as input. A pseudo-real-time validation since1998 shows the indicator's usefulness in short-term economic analysis. This type of indicator provides original qualitative information that complements standard quantitative tools for estimating GDP growth.