Le chômage qui sévit actuellement dans les pays industrialisés atteint un niveau inacceptable, suscite de graves problèmes humains et entraîne des coûts sociaux très lourds. On explique généralement la montée du chômage dans le monde par les chocs sévères qui ont affecté la production pendant les années 1970. Notamment la hausse des rémunérations réelles, la forte hausse des prix du pétrole et des autres matières premières et la distribution des revenus qui en est résultée au profit de pays à faible propension à dépenser, et par des réactions politiques inadéquates. La rigidité des économies industrielles, notamment de la Communauté européenne, rend difficile l’adaptation à un environnement nouveau et en continuelle évolution.

Les politiques budgétaires et monétaires expansionnistes sont souvent considérées comme inappropriées dans la situation actuelle parce que l’on craint qu’elles ne se répercutent davantage sur les prix que sur la production. On préconise dès lors des politiques de demande rigoureuses pour maîtriser l’inflation et susciter ainsi un environnement plus favorable à la croissance à moyen terme.

La puissance du mouvement syndical, aux Etats-Unis, se reflète au travers des conventions collectives. L’élaboration de ces conventions est régie, depuis 1936, par le Wagner Act. En particulier, un seul syndicat est abilité à représenter les ouvriers d’une unité de production. Cette unité reflète la volonté de syndicalisation des ouvriers qui doivent donner la majorité de leurs suffrages au syndicat qui les représente. En raison de la multiplicité des syndicats, plus de 170 en 1975, cette réglementation a pour effet de segmenter les négociations collectives en petites unités et de réduire le champ d’application des centrales syndicales aux seules unités qui ont su les élire. Ainsi, en 1975, près de trente pour cent des ouvriers du secteur manufacturier ne sont pas couverts par une convention collective. De même, seuls quatre pour cent des ouvriers couverts dépendent d’une convention collective qui s’applique à l’intégralité de leur branche d’activité. Pour les autres, la convention ne s’applique qu’à l’établissement, l’entreprise ou la région dans lesquels ils travaillent.

We will define a supplier of a single product to be «dynamically discriminating» if he offers the product for sale at a sequence of different prices. Obviously the extent of such discrimination that is possible will depend on buyers’ expectations of future price movements and on any dynamic properties of buyers’ demand functions. The objective of this paper is to examine the extent of price discrimination that can take place in a market characterised by buyers’ perfect foresight and where the value each buyer places on the product changes as the number of sales increase.

If potential buyers are ‘myopic’ and believe that the current price of a commodity is not going to change in the future, then they will purchase if the current price is no more than their current reservation price. Given a distribution of reservation prices, a monopolist supplier can perfectly discriminate in this market by, say, first offering the commodity at a very high price and selling to those customers with the highest reservation price, and then gradually reducing the price, collecting more custom, and allowing no consumers’ surplus to exist.

Ever since the breakdown of the Bretton Woods System, there has been a chorus of economists calling for internationally negotiated coordination of macroeconomic policies. Most of them work for international organisations or have developed a special interest in discretionary macro-policy or optimal-control theory.

At the same time, very little centralised coordination has actually taken place. Exchange rate surveillance by the International Monetary Fund does not seem to have played a major role. The economic summit meetings are not used to coordinate macro-policy any longer. Even the first Bonn Summit (1978), the apparent showpiece of centralised coordination, does not seem to have yielded internationally negotiated macroeconomic policy concessions from national governments, but rather enabled their leaders to pursue their domestic objectives against strong internal opposition.

There has been a strong resurgence of interest in the life cycle model of consumption with a stochastic income stream. In particular, with various degrees of restrictiveness, it is argued that this theory implies that consumption should follow a Markov process. At one extreme with additive quadratic preferences, perfect capital markets and a known constant interest rate, this holds exactly. More generally with additive preferences, expected discounted marginal utilities obey the martingale condition. The purpose of the present note is to point out that such results depend on the existence of interior solutions and that such an assumption is much more restrictive in this framework than it is generally in economics.

With income risk and expected utility maximisation, the utility of each state is weighted by its probability. Suppose that there are some high and low income possibilities and income has a positive mean. The utility function may possess one of two properties: either the marginal utility of consumption in a state remains finite or becomes unbounded as consumption becomes low.

Until recently standard trade theory had ignored the fact that resources are devoted not only to production of goods and services but also to rent, revenue and tariff seeking activities. Competitive rent and revenue seeking and their impact on welfare and resource allocation have been thoroughly examined by A. Krueger [1974] and J. Bhagwati and T. Srinivasan [1980]. The studies mentioned above are based on the presumption that rent seeking and lobbying activities effect the availability of physical inputs employed in the production of goods. In this paper we argue that lobbying also affects the efficiency of firms through its impact on the allocation of managerial effort which is internal to the firm. This stems from the fact that firms can raise their profits by lobbying for tariffs which in turn raise the domestic price. Since managerial effort is an input in both production and lobbying activities, and since the likelihood of having a tariff levied depends on the lobbying effort, we expect some managerial effort to be directed to lobbying at the expense of production and thus adversely affecting the production efficiency of firms.

A widespread view expressed in the theoretical macroeconomic literature concerned with price formation in open economies is that, in the absence of impediments to trade and insulating exchange rate movements, the prices of their internationally tradable goods are, by and large, determined at the level of competitive international markets. The most common justification is that the goods concerned are produced by a large number of firms from different countries, and that competitive commodity arbitrage tends to integrate the respective markets by eliminating all price divergences (in common currency). If so, the industries of the individual small economy can be conceived as competitive foreign price takers, implying both the dominance of foreign price influences over domestic costs,and a high degree of price flexibility with respect to short-term fluctuations in (international) demand.

In this paper we use a two-country model of flexible exchange rates to analyse strategic interdependence. Values for the policy instruments are selected from discrete sets, increasing the likelihood of a non-unique Nash equilibrium. Communication between the policy makers becomes very important; we define international institutions as communication devices, since their mission in the context of our model (we are in a one-shot game) is indeed the exchange of some information, either policy proposals or recommendations. We discuss two such devices: direct communication (for instance, a telephone line), and communication through a mediator (an international parliament) that makes policy recommendations to both countries, which are not necessarily followed. The conclusion is that these devices may increase actual or expected welfare levels and ease agreement between decision makers, even in a world where Nash equilibria are efficient.

Moral hazard is one of the problems that is believed to plague the insurance industry. A major aspect of the problem deals with the effect of the availability of insurance on the level of care exercised by the insured to reduce the probability of loss. When an insurance policy is not available against, say theft, an economic agent could devote time to watching over his property. At the extreme he could ensure that the probability of loss was zero, but the cost of such a strategy would likely be prohibitive. For such an instance the optimal action is to expend an effort less than that required to reduce the probability of theft to zero and hence to bear some risk. If we assume that economic agents are risk averse they would be willing to pay for a transfer of risk to another economic agent thereby enhancing their welfare. This transfer of risk is obtained through the purchase of an insurance policy. However if all goods are normal, the increase in welfare obtained from the purchase of insurance will be used to increase the consumption of leisure and that of other goods. As a consequence the purchase of insurance will cause the economic agents to expand less effort on the reduction of the probability of loss. That is, the optimal level of effort devoted to guarding against loss will depend on whether insurance is available.

Recently, in most of the economically advanced European countries inflation has been substantially reduced. But that went together with a rise in the rate of unemployment to levels not experienced for the last 30 years. Forecasts predict that unemployment is unlikely to decrease within the coming years. The increased interdependence of national economies led to calls for coordinated policy actions in order to expand economic activity in Europe, thus avoiding costly non-cooperative strategies.

There is, however, a strong criticism of proposals for coordination of national stabilisation policies. Economic theory, it is said, proves that such a coordination is at best superfluous and may even be harmful. An eloquent exponent of this view is Vaubel (1985).

This view is the result of assuming that there is no need for macropolicy on a national level in the first place. The present paper intends to show that this cannot be justified on purely theoretical grounds. It will be argued that this assumption does not follow from sound theoretical arguments.

L’analyse des performances industrielles doit permettre de faire ressortir l’incidence, outre des formes d’organisation des marchés et du comportement des firmes, des exigences de la Division Internationale du Travail. Dans la mesure où l’on assiste à une insertion croissante des entreprises en dehors de leur espace national, l’analyse doit répercuter un tel phénomène. Parlant d’insertion croissante, il est tout d’abord fait référence à l’augmentation en termes absolus et relatifs des flux échangés, des importations, des exportations. Si ces flux sont susceptibles d’affecter le niveau des performances observées à un instant donné, dans une perspective plus dynamique, ces flux participent, avec des intensités variables, à modifier l’organisation elle-même des secteurs. Qu’il s’agisse d’une élévation du degré de concentration ou d’un déplacernent des ressources allouées vers un autre secteur, les flux d’importations s’ajoutent à des stratégies plus nationales pour modifier les structures industrielles. Par ailleurs, la pénétration des capitaux étrangers n’est pas sans effet, semble-t-il, sur les performances mêmes des secteurs ainsi concernés. Enfin, le processus d’internationalisation développé par des grandes mais aussi par de plus petites firmes ne peut pas manquer d’affecter encore la relation entre les structures telles qu’elles sont saisies à travers une série d’indicateurs de concentration et de barrières à l’entrée et le niveau des taux ou des marges de profits.

Ce papier propose une modélisation originale du commerce extérieur belge de produits manufacturés. Pour ce qui est des exportations en effet, les équations structurelles d’offre et de demande sont l’une et l’autre spécifiées, ce qui conduit à estimer un système d’équations simultanées. Si les déterminants de la demande d’exportations sont bien connus, il n’en va pas de même pour l’offre qui n’a jusqu’à présent pas fait l’objet d’investigations empiriques. Sont introduits comme facteurs explicatifs de l’offre d’exportations : le prix belge à l’exportation, la part distributive des salaires en tant qu’indicateur de la compétitivité-coûts et une variable représentant la pression relative de la demande mondiale par rapport à la demande intérieure. Quant à l’équation de demande d’importations, elle est estimée de manière classique par moindres carrés simples et après avoir postulé une courbe d’offre infiniment élastique.

Unemployment has risen steadily during the last five years in all of the major European economies. Although there have been some signs that the rate of increase may have slackened this is mainly due to the fiscal-led expansion in the United States. Recent evidence suggests that the growth rate in the United States is slackening, and the need to reduce the structural budget deficit means that the rest of the developed countries can no longer rely on the United States as the main source of demand growth in the world economy. In spite of this, European governments have been reluctant to undertake fiscal and monetary policy actions which might sustain the recovery. In part this reflects a pessimism about the efficacy of conventional stabilisation policies born of the experience of the mid-seventies. However, the current situation is arguably very different now. Whereas the recession of the mid-seventies was largely the result of a supply-side shock requiring a downward adjustment in real wages, the recession of the early eighties is largely a consequence of the contractionary fiscal and monetary policies pursued outside the United States. That the present high levels of unemployment are Keynesian rather than Classical in nature has been argued forcefully by e.g. Dornbusch et al. (1983) and Bruno (1985). A reversal of these contractionary policies could therefore be expected to increase employment. Thus Layard et al. (1984) have argued there is scope for a temporary, supply-side friendly, fiscal expansion concentrated in public investment, subsidies to private investment and measures to reduce the marginal cost of employment. This would be accompanied by a modest relaxation of monetary policy to prevent real interest rates rising. Because such an expansion would be temporary it need have no long-run implications for inflation or real interest rates.

Coordination of economic policies and convergence of economic performance within the European Community are objectives already laid out in the Treaty of Rome. A number of later decisions by the Council of Ministers reaffirm and specify these principles. The 1974 Convergence Decision provides a procedural framework for review of the economic situation and policy with the aim of bringing about greater convergence of macroeconomic performance. In this process a central place is given to the setting of budgetary policy guidelines. In addition, the EMS provides a potentially strong mechanism for coordinating monetary policy under the constraint of fixed, but adjustable, exchange rates and, in principle, free capital movements.