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661. Price Level Convergence and Inflation in Europe

Author:
Gary Clyde Hufbauer, Erika Wada, and John H. Rogers
Publication Date:
01-2001
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE)
Abstract:
Consumer price inflation in the euro area declined steadily during most of the 1990s. However, in the last two years, both headline and core inflation have risen throughout the area, and sizable cross-country differences in inflation have re-emerged. This is illustrated by Figure 1, which shows the headline consumer price inflation rate for the euro area as a whole and for select member countries. As of October 2000, all euro area countries had headline inflation rates above the European Central Bank's 2 percent medium-term ceiling, with rates ranging from 2.1 percent in France and Austria to 6 percent in Ireland. In Greece, which will join the euro area on 1 January 2001, inflation was 3.8 percent.
Topic:
Economics and Political Economy
Political Geography:
Europe, Greece, France, and Austria

662. What Drove Relative Wages in France? Structural Decomposition Analysis in a General Equilibrium Framework, 1970-92

Author:
Sébastien Jean and Olivier Bontout
Publication Date:
09-2001
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS)
Abstract:
This paper confronts a CGE model to observed evolutions in France, between 1970 and 1992, through a structural decomposition analysis. The choice of the model and the assumption of constant elasticities over time enable the structural change of the economy between two equilibria to be summarised through a set of four types of state variables, reflecting the effect of technical change, changes in factor supplies, shifts in consumption patterns, and international trade. Simulations then allow the contribution of each of these shocks to be assessed. We find that technical change had a strong positive impact on the relative wage of skilled to unskilled workers, while the impact of changes in factor supplies is strongly negative. The effect of international trade is far less important. However, if we take into account a trade-induced effect on productivity, then we find that trade substantially increased wage inequalities.
Topic:
Economics, International Trade and Finance, and Political Economy
Political Geography:
China, Europe, and France

663. Globalization and French Cultural Identity

Author:
Philip H. Gordon and Sophie Meunier
Publication Date:
03-2001
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
Concerns about the potentially negative effects of globalization are particularly salient in France because of France's longstanding desire to maintain a universal culture and concomitant fear of cultural domination. This article analyzes the impact of globalization on various aspects of French culture-including the entertainment industry (movies, audiovisuals, and books), food, and language-and shows why the French resist globalization more on cultural than economic grounds. The article also looks at French policy responses to the cultural "threat" of globalization and argues that those policies are both less effective and less necessary than many French seem to think.
Topic:
Economics and Globalization
Political Geography:
France

664. La Corruption politique: un mal français

Author:
Éric Dupin
Publication Date:
03-2001
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
This article examines why political corruption has become not only more visible in the past twenty years in France, but also more serious as a problem. After looking briefly at changes in the role of the judiciary and the media, the author focuses on issues of campaign finance and the economic insecurities electoral officials often face in the current political system. Psychological factors have mattered as well. Too many members of the political elite have assumed that political power entitled them to material advantages and exemption from conventional standards of ethical conduct. The concentration of power and weak boundaries between political, economic, and administrative elites have made the problem particularly acute in France.
Topic:
Economics
Political Geography:
France

665. Change and Resistance in the Fight Against Corruption

Publication Date:
03-2001
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
Although political corruption in France is hardly new, only at the end of the twentieth century have public authorities made important efforts to address it. This article explains why, stressing underlying economic conditions in the 1980s and 1990s and changes in the composition and norms in the judicial, police, and administrative professions. The author goes on to argue that despite the publicity given to recent scandals, the attack on corruption remains restrained and politicians of both the Left and the Right remain ambivalent about facing the problem.
Topic:
Economics
Political Geography:
France

666. Vichy: Beyond the Syndrome Syndrome?

Author:
Steven Ungar
Publication Date:
03-2001
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
Henry Rousso's The Vichy Syndrome (1987) has changed the way many people think and write about France since 1940. Yet it is likely that the term "syndrome" (from the Greek sundromos or "running together") in his title remains a provocation because it invokes a pattern of behavior linked to disease and abnormality By extension, it conveyed an implied accusation—perhaps even an indictment—concerning an inability on the part of France as nation and society to confront the nature of the 1940-1944 period. Among historians, debate on the data or evidence that the concept of syndrome might legitimize or even privilege with regard to the writing of history added to questions about what had prompted Rousso to level this critique against colleagues in the discipline.
Political Geography:
France

667. French Slavery and Modern Political Culture

Author:
Pierre H. Boulle
Publication Date:
03-2001
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
The concept of an emerging modern political culture, developed in the eighteenth century and informing the struggles associated with 1789, has taken root in historical discourse. It offers what to some is the significant advantage of permitting the analysis of values which were once associated with a rising bourgeoisie—principles of individual liberty and rights, of merit, and free labor against group privileges, birth, and corporate rights— without necessarily tying these to a particular social group.2 The two works reviewed here, both the result of recent American Ph.D. dissertations, borrow the concept as an organizing principle, but, interestingly, focus on a major contradiction within that culture: the conflict between slavery, dominant in the colonies and spreading to France itself in the eighteenth century, and the new culture's core concepts of individual freedom and free labor. Sue Peabody studies the various court cases in which slaves in eighteenth-century France sought to obtain their freedom. Laurent Dubois, using a 1793 local slave rebellion in Trois-Rivières, Guadeloupe, attempts to demonstrate that the slaves used the emerging political culture proclaimed from France to fashion freedom for themselves. Both argue that, far from being peripheral issues, events related to colonial labor helped fashion the debate in France and, indeed, forced its radicalization.
Political Geography:
France

668. Dangerous Liaisons in 1940s Quebec: Vichy or la France libre

Author:
Robert Schwartzwald
Publication Date:
03-2001
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
It may come as a surprise to American readers that during the Second World War, both the Vichy regime and la France libre cared deeply about public opinion in French Canada. Yet resource-rich Canada was Britain's principal ally against Nazi Germany before the collapse of the Hitler-Stalin pact and the attack on Pearl Harbor. If public opinion in English-speaking Canada rallied immediately behind Great Britain and was solidly interventionist, this was not the case in Quebec. In his study, Montreal historian Eric Amyot demonstrates that the opposing French camps well understood the necessity of waging a war for public opinion in the largely French-speaking province. At stake were Canadian government policy and the respective claims for legitimacy of Vichy and la France libre both at home and on the world stage.
Topic:
Government
Political Geography:
Britain and France

669. War and Liberation: Histories from Below

Author:
Steven Zdatny
Publication Date:
03-2001
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
Little remains today of the so-called Resistencialist Myth, the notion that France was a nation of resisters, save for a handful of treasonous collabos. It was a useful and ingenious fiction. Maybe it spared the country civil war. It certainly bought France selfesteem and saved civil society for the Fourth Republic and the resurrection of liberal democracy. But it's hard to imagine anyone believes it anymore, if anybody truly believed it then. We know that these sorts of political legends do not die all at once; they fall apart in stages, like Francisco Franco. In this case, the stages are well known. In the late 1960s, Marcel Ophuls's The Sorrow and the Pity offered a countermyth of Collaborationist France. A few years later, Robert Paxton's careful, irrefutable scholarship ravaged the legend of la France résistante and re-ignited interest in the real history of Vichy. His Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order depended on research in German occupation sources because French documents were closed. But actors die, fifty-year rules expire, politicians and archivists tack with the wind, all of which has prodded French historians to an unprecedented scrutiny of the nation's experience of war and occupation.
Topic:
War
Political Geography:
France

670. La présidence française du Conseil de l'Union européenne

Author:
Michel Gueldry
Publication Date:
06-2001
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
Du 1er juillet au 31 décembre 2000, la France présida le Conseil de l'Union européenne (UE), et ce pour la onzième fois depuis la création de la troïka et de la présidence tournante en 1978. Elle assuma ce rôle précédemment au second semestre 1989 et au premier semestre 1995. En 1999, l'Allemagne et la Finlande assumèrent cette responsabilité, puis le Portugal précéda la France au premier semestre 2000. Cette fonction est un moment fort de la politique nationale—du fait de la cohabitation—et de la politique continentale, car les pays d'Europe centrale et orientale (PECO) frappent à la porte de l'UE, qui doit se préparer pour les intégrer. C'est pourquoi cet article étudie d'abord la dynamique de la cohabitation envers l'Europe, puis le rôle, le contexte et le programme de cette présidence française. Ensuite, il résume les décisions prises aux sommets de Biarritz et de Nice et enfin il analyse leur signification pour la France, les relations franco-allemandes et le futur de l'Union.
Political Geography:
Europe and France