Public Debt Sustainability: Some Results on the French Case

La soutenabilité de la dette publique: Quelques résultats pour la France

Jean Boissinot, Clotilde l'Angevin and Brieuc Monfort ()
Additional contact information
Jean Boissinot: INSEE - Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE)
Clotilde l'Angevin: INSEE - Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE)
Brieuc Monfort: CREST-INSEE - Centre de Recherche en Economie et en Statistique - ENSAI - Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Analyse de l'Information [Bruz] - Groupe ENSAE-ENSAI - Groupe des Écoles Nationales d'Économie et Statistique - ENSAE Paris - École Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Économique - Groupe ENSAE-ENSAI - Groupe des Écoles Nationales d'Économie et Statistique - IP Paris - Institut Polytechnique de Paris - INSEE - Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE)

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: In France, government debt steadily rose from just below 20% of GDP in 1980 to more than 60% today. This raises concerns about the sustainability of public finances i.e. whether the government's intertemporal budget constraint can be satisfied without a major change in fiscal policy practices and orientations. Public finance developments in France between 1978 and 2002 are found to be weakly sustainable. Contrary to a situation of strong sustainability, where, in the long run, changes in government revenues and spending match, there has been a persistent gap between public spending and revenues developments. The dynamics of public debt is captured by breaking down the growth of government debt into different components within a cointegrated VAR model. This enables us to identify the trends that explain the strong persistence in the growth.

Keywords: government debt; intertemporal budget constraint; sustainability; cointegrated VAR model; dette publique; contrainte de budget intertemporelle; soutenabilité; modèle VAR cointégré (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-12
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://insee.hal.science/hal-05708638v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://insee.hal.science/hal-05708638v1/document (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:hal:wpaper:hal-05708638

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().