Social justice through the market or the State[Justice sociale par le marché ou par l'Etat ?]

The purpose of this brief contribution is to identify the respective roles of the market and public intervention in strategies to promote social justice and the relationships between them. While there are tensions between economic efficiency and the search for greater equity, it is also known that increasing inequalities negatively affects growth. On the basis of a simplified study of the mechanisms of redistribution, it is shown that between the state and the market adjustment modalities must be initiated, which is illustrated by the diversity of forms of the welfare state and redistributive strategies. In this respect, the debate between targeting and universality of social benefits is crucial in the search for redistributive efficiency. The article ends with a comparison of a sample of European countries based on aggregated data from national accounts. This comparison shows that there is no redistributive policy without a high level of state intervention in household income. If there is a wide diversity of models of socialization of household income across the EU, the observation of the inequality of disposable income from the gini index suggests a relative convergence of the situations between the countries of the sample.