La contrainte budgétaire lâche et la théorie économique

Soft Budget Constraint and Economic Theory

Mehrdad Vahabi

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The budget constraint as a bookkeeping identity is a fundamental concept of standard microeconomics. Clower reinterpreted this concept as a rational planning postulate. The notion of soft budget constraint (SBC), formulated for the first time by Janos Kornai (1979) in the context of a socialist economy is a heresy according to standard microeconomics and Clower, since budget constraint is by definition hard. Nevertheless, this concept is now applied in the analysis of post-socialist transition, emerging and developing countries, as well as developed capitalist economies. During the last fifteen years, the universal feature of the SBC motivated a formalised representation of this phenomenon in the framework of asymmetrical information literature. Hence, the SBC is reduced to a time inconsistency problem, namely the lack of credible dynamic commitment by the principal. The SBC is thus incorporated in new microeconomics and loses its institutional specificity. On a theoretical level, this removal of institutional specificity impoverishes the concept of SBC and brings us to reconsider the premises on which the original theory has been founded and to question the theoretical contradictions and tensions in Kornai’s works, from its beginning, which impeded the emergence of a more coherent institutional theory of the SBC.

Keywords: contrainte budgétaire (CB); contrainte budgétaire lâche (CBL); le Principe de Say; la loi de Walras; effet Kornai (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D01 P2 P5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003-09
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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