Documents Fitoussi, Jean-Paul 43 results

"In February of 2008, amid the looming global financial crisis, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France asked Nobel Prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, along with the distinguished French economist Jean Paul Fitoussi, to establish a commission of leading economists to study whether Gross Domestic Product (GDP)--the most widely used measure of economic activity--is a reliable indicator of economic and social progress. The Commission was given the further task of laying out an agenda for developing better measures.
Mismeasuring Our Lives is the result of this major intellectual effort, one with pressing relevance for anyone engaged in assessing how and whether our economy is serving the needs of our society. The authors offer a sweeping assessment of the limits of GDP as a measurement of the well-being of societies--considering, for example, how GDP overlooks economic inequality (with the result that most people can be worse off even though average income is increasing); and does not factor environmental impacts into economic decisions.
In place of GDP, Mismeasuring Our Lives introduces a bold new array of concepts, from sustainable measures of economic welfare, to measures of savings and wealth, to a "green GDP." At a time when policymakers worldwide are grappling with unprecedented global financial and environmental issues, here is an essential guide to measuring the things that matter."

"This draft of our contribution to ??The politics and economics of change in European social models?? book project, is focused on the relation between macroeconomic policies and social models in the EU 15 during the last two decades. It first describes the shift towards the Maastricht ??culture of discipline??, i.e. the effect of the implementation of rules governing macroeconomic policies management for euro area countries, assesses its consequence in terms of economic performance and evaluates how those rules are playing out so far in the current crisis. We then attempt at detailing the second shift towards ??structural reforms?? of social models to show how it has resulted in a weakening of ??automatic stabilizers?? that, therefore, can'??t fully play their role in the current crisis. Finally, we offer some analytical insights to make sense of those two shifts."

"This paper reviews the arguments for and against the 'Stability and Growth Pact' signed by the countries of the Euro area. We find the theoretical debate to be inconclusive, as both externality and credibility arguments can be used to yield opposite, and equally plausible conclusions. We also argue that evidence in favour of a Pact-like rule is scant. We therefore suggest the view that the Stability Pact is a public social norm, and that a country's adherence to that norm is in fact a response to the need to preserve reputation among the other members of the European Union. Using this extreme but not implausible hypothesis, we build a simple model similar in spirit to Akerlof's (1980) seminal paper on social norms, and we show that reputation issues may cause the emergence of a stable but inferior equilibrium. We further show that after the enlargement, with a number of countries anxious to prove their 'soundness' joining the club, the problems posed by the pact/social norm are likely to increase."