Economic Expertise at War. A Brief History of the Institutionalization of French Economic Expertise (1936-1946)

Muriel Dal Pont Legrand and Katia Caldari
Additional contact information
Katia Caldari: University of Padova

No 2024-15, GREDEG Working Papers from Groupe de REcherche en Droit, Economie, Gestion (GREDEG CNRS), Université Côte d'Azur, France

Abstract: French economic expertise developed significantly during the interwar period when economic issues, and particularly those resulting directly from World War I (WWI), became the overriding concern for Europe's democracies. Before the end of WWII, three major Institutes of Conjuncture had been created, all of them driven by the need for economic policy indicators. The IRES was established in 1933 by Charles Rist, the Institut Français de la Conjoncture was founded in 1938 by Alfred Sauvy and the ISEA was instituted in 1944 by François Perroux. Not surprisingly, all three were working on productivity measures. From 1936, debate was focused on the issue of the 40-hour week and then moved to the context of the arms race and the preparation for an inevitable war. The war period resulted in shortages which required planning of production and in the post-war period the focus was on plans for the reconstruction of France and then Europe more generally. All these periods generated demand for differentiated economic expertise in productivity. In 1946, the first French National Accounts were published alongside the establishment of the Commissariat Général au Plan and INSEE, which resulted in another distinct period.

Keywords: war; economic expertise; institute of conjuncture; productivity; planning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B1 B2 B3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2024-05, Revised 2024-09
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://195.220.190.85/GREDEG-WP-2024-15.pdf Revised version, 2024-09 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gre:wpaper:2024-15

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in GREDEG Working Papers from Groupe de REcherche en Droit, Economie, Gestion (GREDEG CNRS), Université Côte d'Azur, France Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Patrice Bougette ().