Instabilités économiques et ajustements conjoncturels

Paul Löwenthal

Reflets et perspectives de la vie économique, 2005, vol. XLIV, issue 1, 67-71

Abstract: Stability has become the main stumbling-block of economic policy, because it is crucial for private investment: firm?s micro efficiency is a clue towards macroeconomic growth, hence wellbeing. This view rests on a representative-agent approach, that macroeconomists know to be spurious. Resource allocation, including, at least, some aspects of social distribution, are also relevant. Policy is involved, hence politics: individual choices are not the only ones to meet. Instability is partly due to political shocks. Ill-balanced policies, even aiming at some form of stability, like the EU fiscal norms, can prove globally destabilizing. Hence a policy coordination problem, involving collective choices ? priorities, instruments ? hence politics. Collective will legitimately exists in democracies, and it can well prefer some (e.g., financial) instability to a socially all-too-expensive stability. When perverse (incl. social) consequences must be feared, it is the economists? task to explain it but, once informed, it?s up political decision-takers, not economists, to make their choice. We enriched macroeconomic analysis with microeconomic and political rationality. Once admitted that policy necessarily (and legitimately) goes along with politics, we should further enrich economic policy-making to relevant sociological, legal or ethical approaches: what Léon Dupriez labeled the ?wide course? of political economy, forsaking the implicit ceteris paribus clause of economic self-sufficiency.

Keywords: Instability; cycles (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
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