The ‘fiscal package’ passed on 21 August 2007 (known in France under its acronym ‘TEPA’) was sold by the new government as an important tool to bolster confidence and thus make reforms easier. Since then, it has become the main target of the government critics in the French political debate. When the project was made public, we had concluded that, from a strict economic angle, the fiscal side of the first reforms announced by PM Francois Fillon was ‘an unnecessary fiscal stimulus without long-term merits’. Real life has confirmed this diagnosis: the ‘fiscal shock’ was based on flawed economics, namely that fiscal stimulus generate high growth returns, and proved counter-productive in the French political debate. Yet, the new government’s fiscal policy is not as negative as some critics are saying, and it is not too late to re-design it so that budget decisions would support structural reforms.
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As a candidate, Sarkozy promised to reform labour markets. His first move concerns the infamous 35 hours workweek, not really a surprise. The shorter workweek had been introduced by the socialist government of Jospin with the explicit aim of sharing work to increase employment. It followed on earlier moves under President Mitterrand in the 1980s and under President Chirac in the 1990s. That the idea was mistaken may be obvious to (non-French) economists, but it remains controversial in France because substantial subsidies, introduced when the Jospin government realized that the measure could, well, actually reduce employment, make it difficult to identify its effects.
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The 2007 budget should be a decently good vintage for the French economy, given the extraordinary electoral circumstances that will prevail in 2007: Presidential election in May, followed by general elections in June. Against this backdrop, one would have expected the incumbent government to flatter the electorate by injecting some growth boosters by means of budgetary stimulus, leaving to its successor the task to clean up the fiscal mess. My reading of the draft budget as it is now in the hands of the National Assembly is that it is a fair compromise between electoral contingencies and the imperious necessity to rationalize public spending, streamline the tax system, and cut the ballooning public debt. Actually, the public debt should decline already this year, as a percentage of GDP, for the first time since 2001.
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In his seasonal greetings to the press French president Jacques Chirac proposed to widen the tax base for employers' contributions to social security from wages to value added. The idea of cutting employers' payroll contributions to foster employment is not distinctively French. Instead the idea of financing it by widening the tax base from wages to value added certainly is: In general, governments tend to finance reductions in employers' social security contributions through the general tax system. This is the case of the German coalition government that plans to finance a reduction in employers' contributions to unemployment insurance from 6.5% to 4.5% through receipts from the general tax system.
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Representatives from 150 member countries of the World Trade Organization met in mid-December in Hong Kong, aiming to expand trade flows and improve trade rules. The city's enormous convention center welcomed thousands of delegates representing governments, the private sector, NGOs, journalists, and multilateral organizations. Outside the huge facility, tens of thousands of anti-globalization activists once again protested, against neo-liberalism and trade liberalization. An unnecessary protest, since the gathering proved there is no great conceptual difference between the views of those inside and outside the great WTO bi-annual media theater.
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During his seasonal greetings to the press, President Chirac revealed that he had asked the cabinet to review the tax base of employers' social contributions. The reform he proposes would penalize capital intensive industries relatively to labour intensive ones; in the long term, it would backfire.
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