Total Factor Productivity: How to more accurately assess "our ignorance" ?[Productivité globale des facteurs : comment évaluer plus précisément « notre ignorance » ?]

Total Factor Productivity: How to more accurately assess "our ignorance"? This article deals with the topic of growth accountability and is applied to the French economy. Retrospective exercise (but possibly a prospective one), it seeks to know what the weight of the determinants of growth had been. In its usual version, this framework has many merits but does not allow to aspire to an exhaustive quantitative determination of the sources of economic growth. This is all the more true since the hypotheses which are, nevertheless, empirically plausible, which we develop successively and then consider cumulatively, are not included. The weight of these sources is then mechanically found in the "Residue of Solow", measuring "our ignorance" and thus not considering the true levers of growth. This contribution is of an economic, methodological and statistical nature and will focus on 2015 selected as an illustration. The usual framework thus enriched and evaluated (and replicable spatiotemporally including prospectively), provides a model of refined analysis and accounting of short-term economic growth, revealing the obtaining of growth contributions that are different from those which would have been obtained with the standard exercise of growth accounting.