Éric Pichet: Publication

“Structural reforms and respecting European treaties are the two pre-requisites to reduce deficits in the long-term and boost the economy’s potential growth rate which, at around 1%, is much lower than the government estimates (close to 4%). It is the French economy’s ‘corsets’ that are to blame for the country’s weak growth (both potential and recorded) which itself generates the deficits and not the austerity policies made necessary by galloping deficits as partisans of the so-called demand- led policy think. The French economy is primarily ill because of its public finances.”

Éric Pichet

Le programme de stabilité et le pacte de responsabilité : la trajectoire des finances publiques de 2014 à 2017 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2499496 Article in Revue de Droit Fiscal n31-35 (2014).
Structural reforms, The French Economy corsets

Thinking , Country

“Despite a relative control over expenditure in 2013, the persistence of a very high public deficit (4.3%) was mainly due to an unprecedented and unexpected drop in tax revenue which confirms the existence of a tax tolerance threshold, specific to each country, and which may have been reached in France. Above this threshold, any tax increase has a counterproductive effect as compulsory taxes stifle activity by further weakening the economy’s growth potential.”

Éric Pichet

Le programme de stabilité et le pacte de responsabilité : la trajectoire des finances publiques de 2014 à 2017 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2499496 Article in Revue de Droit Fiscal n31-35 (2014).
Tax policy, The Tax tolerance Threshold

Country

“Thirty years of lax budget policy (the Trente Dispendieuses) marked by soaring public spending in the 1980’s, the happy-go-lucky attitude of the 1990’s and finally, a policy of procrastination in the 2000’s characterised by the development of creative budgetary marketing strategies exclusively destined to delay the (always) socially and politically painful moment of addressing the accounts.”

Éric Pichet

Le programme de stabilité et le pacte de responsabilité : la trajectoire des finances publiques de 2014 à 2017 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2499496 Article in Revue de Droit Fiscal n31-35 (2014).
Budgetary policy, From the Expensive 30 toe the Expensive 36, The Expensive 30

Pain , Happiness

“In the developed world taxation is always a political construct, a living organism that is always changing due to endless modifications imposed by lawmakers who are themselves sensitive to the public mood and to changes in social ideology. This is a haphazard scaffolding without an architect that lacks rationality and coherency, with tax and social expenditures- referred to here as social and tax expenditures - constituting a superstructure that is all the more complex given its roots in a tax system whose benchmark standards are subject to innumerable exceptions.”

Éric Pichet

Tax policy, Tax and Social Expenditures

World , Mood , Change

“At the end of the current five-year presidential term and the “Trente-Six Dispendieuses” (36 years of uninterrupted deficits from 1981 to 2017) far-reaching public expenditure reforms will be required. These will be all the more painful as they are far too late.”

Éric Pichet

La trajectoire des finances publiques de 2014 à 2017 : impuissance du droit et vérité des comptes http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2563481 Article in Revue de Droit Fiscal n48 (2014).
Budgetary policy, From the Expensive 30 toe the Expensive 36, The Expensive 36

Pain