Ostrum
  • News & Chronicles
  • France
  • Euro Area
  • United States
  • International
  • Politics & Society
  • Monetary Policy
  • Media
  • Decoding
  • About Philippe Waechter
Philippe Waechter's blog
  • Insights
  • About us
  • Expertise
  • Our people
  • Media

Philippe Waechter's blog
My french blog
  • News & Chronicles
  • France
  • Euro Area
  • United States
  • International
  • Politics & Society
  • Monetary Policy
  • Media
  • Decoding
  • About Philippe Waechter
  • News & Chronicles
  • Climate
  • France
  • Euro Area
  • United States
  • International
  • Politics & Society
  • Monetary Policy
  • Media
  • Decoding
Philippe Waechter's blog
Prévôté
Previous Next
  • 4 min

Purchasing power, debt and jobs – the impossible French equation

  • 24 January 2019
  • Philippe Waechter
  • Employment Dynamics
  • Households' indebtedness
  • Purchasing Power
  • Yellow vests
Total
0
Shares
0
0
0

This post is available in pdf format Forbes-23-01-2019-PW-en

Careful observation of the French economy provides some insight into the swift escalation in social unrest since November. The initial question of purchasing power sparked off the movement in November. At the start of the financial crisis, purchasing power was not too severely hit initially due to the hefty impact of automatic stabilizers, i.e. economic mechanisms that help even out the effects of shocks over time via redistribution. This system had worked fairly well in the past, keeping GDP fluctuations down during economic downturns. This is one of the key aspects of the French redistributive model.
With a continued weaker macroeconomic situation than in the past, the economy adapted. Three major changes can help shed some light on the social strife that has been dragging down the French economy.

The first problem is that French economic trend growth is now more sluggish than before the 2008/2009 crisis, and this has an impact on purchasing power trends.
We can analyze this situation using the chart below, providing an overview of purchasing power trends on the one hand (demand) and productivity data on the other (supply).
The purple line shows the trend in purchasing power per consumption unit and the blue line plots productivity (GDP per hour worked). We can see that these two indicators ran parallel before the 2007 crisis, then diverged until 2012/2013 before converging again, although with weaker trend growth than before the crisis. Under normal circumstances, these two indicators should move at a similar pace, and a long-lasting divergence is not feasible i.e. wages cannot be disconnected from income creation via the production process

1 2Next page
Related Topics
  • Employment Dynamics
  • Households' indebtedness
  • Purchasing Power
  • Yellow vests
Subscribe to the newsletter

All the news from Philippe Waechter’s blog in your mailbox


Loading
ABOUT PHILIPPE WAECHTER

Le magazine d’experts d’Ostrum

ABOUT OSTRUM AM
  • About us
  • Media room
  • Our publications
  • Cookie Policy (EU)
FOLLOW ME ON
EXTERNAL LINKS
  • Economists
  • Think tank
  • Central banks
  • Blog roll
©Ostrum AM 2023
An affiliate of : Plan de travail 2

Input your search keywords and press Enter.

Manage Cookie Consent
We use cookies to optimize our website and our service.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}