Le débat sur la croissance économique en Suisse Quelles conclusions ? (text in French)

Jean-Christian Lambelet and Claudio Sfreddo

Cahiers de Recherches Economiques du Département d'économie from Université de Lausanne, Faculté des HEC, Département d’économie

Abstract: " Switzerland is the growth laggard in the industrial world " - this dismal view has become part and parcel of today's conventional wisdom in Switzerland and elsewhere. We show it to be but partially true : accurate when judged by the trend growth rate of officially recorded real GDPs in 1970-2003, but not when considering what we call "adjusted real gross national incomes" ; i.e. a better measure of the populations' material wellbeing than real GDPs, although less correlated with employment and unemployment. The adjustment has to do with how to deflate the balance of goods and services as well as the balance of factor income. More important, and perhaps novel, is that there appears to be no statistically significant difference between the estimated trend growth rate of Switzerland's corrected gross national income and that of most other European countries : almost all tend to grow at a rate of about 2% p.a. There is however a significant long-term growth differential between these European countries, including Switzerland, and overseas ones such as Australia, Canada and the USA. This is because most of Europe suffers from well-known and weighty structural problems, not necessarily the same everywhere, but which should be addressed urgently and efficiently everywhere. The paper also includes a "parable" on the economic impact of oil price shocks, which may be useful for didactical purposes.

Keywords: real GDP vs. material wellbeing; significantly different trend growth rates; Switzerland vs. other European and overseas economies; structural problems; oil price shocks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A20 C12 D43 L13 O47 O51 O52 O56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2005-05
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lau:crdeep:05.06

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