latest LBO

J. Barkley Rosser, Jr. rosserjb at jmu.edu
Fri May 7 11:08:22 PDT 1999


Eric,

France is kind of an odd duck in Europe that has gotten more like the rest of Europe in the last two decades. Prior to the Mitterand presidency that began in 1981 it had very small transfer payments and an inequality level on a par with the US. It did have a relatively high level of state ownership and also a history of substantial indicative planning, although the latter was at its height in the 1950s and 60s, by far the most intensive in Europe, on a scale with Japan and South Korea.

When Mitterand came in he engaged in a major wave of nationalizations that made France for a while one of the most "socialist" nations in Western Europe, if one defines "socialist" by state ownership of the means of production (which is a very "classical" way of defining it, if very imperfect). Mitterand also oversaw a major increase in transfer payments, although Doug's article shows that it remains behind what I would call the "social market economies" that would include both Germany as well as the Scandinavian corporatist social democracies in that regard. Like many other countries, France has since embarked on a major privatization drive, although it continues to have a somewhat higher level of state ownership than do most Western European nations. It certainly has a higher such level than do any of the Scandinavian nations or Germany, thus making it more "socialist" technically than any of the social democracies or social market economies.

Like the US, Canada, Germany, and the UK, France is very far from being "corporatist" in the sense that I used of economy-wide wage bargaining. A prerequisite for that to be seriously carried out is a high level of union membership in the labor force so that some organized labor federation (like the LO in Sweden) can represent labor in such a negotiation. France is one of the few European economies to have a rate of union membership on the order of that in the US, that is, well under 20% of the labor force. Forget corporatism in France. Such "classical corporatism" is easier to pull off in smaller and more homogeneous states like Austria or the Scandinavian nations or the Netherlands.

BTW, I misspoke when I said that Germany never had corporatism. It had the fascist variety under Hitler. But that did not involve an economy-wide wage bargaining. It involved an authoritarian economy-wide wage determination set by the "chamber of labor" in the Nazi government. Barkley Rosser -----Original Message----- From: rayrena <rayrena at accesshub.net> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Friday, May 07, 1999 9:37 AM Subject: Re: latest LBO


>J. Barkley Rosser wrote:
>
>> Congrats to Doug on the section on transfer payments and
>>poverty drawing on the LIS studies. Well done!
>
>Si, si. Excellent, amazing article.
>
>The piece made me curious about France. Of the three economic models
>presented--social democratic, corporatist, liberal--I would have assumed,
>based admittedly on scant knowledge, that France is of the second. Is this
>true, or am I mistaken? (I am aware that these are not hard-and-fast
>categories.) The thing that struck me was that France has a poverty rate
>that tops even liberal countries like the UK and Australia (though, of
>course, it doesn't approach the US's). If France is of the liberal model
>their poverty rate makes perfect statistical sense. If it is of the
>corporatist model, however, it skews the typologies a bit. If this is so,
>what makes France such an anomoly?
>
>I guess maybe the bigger question is: Why does a country with a population
>as activist and take-it-to-the-streets as France's have such high poverty?
>Should this be disheartening? or is France just going through a rough
>period?
>
>Eric Beck
>
>
>



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