IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nse/doctra/g2004-10.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Public Debt Sustainability: Some Results on the French Case

Author

Listed:
  • J. BOISSINOT

    (Insee)

  • C. L'ANGEVIN

    (Insee)

  • B. MONFORT

    (Insee)

Abstract

In France, government debt steadily rose from just below 20% of GDP in 1980 to more than 60% today. This raises concerns about the sustainability of public finances i.e. whether the government's intertemporal budget constraint can be satisfied without a major change in fiscal policy practices and orientations. Public finance developments in France between 1978 and 2002 are found to be weakly sustainable. Contrary to a situation of strong sustainability, where, in the long run, changes in government revenues and spending match, there has been a persistent gap between public spending and revenues developments. The dynamics of public debt is captured by breaking down the growth of government debt into different components within a cointegrated VAR model. This enables us to identify the trends that explain the strong persistence in the growth

Suggested Citation

  • J. Boissinot & C. L'Angevin & B. Monfort, 2004. "Public Debt Sustainability: Some Results on the French Case," Documents de Travail de l'Insee - INSEE Working Papers g2004-10, Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques.
    • Handle: RePEc:nse:doctra:g2004-10
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.bnsp.insee.fr/ark:/12148/bc6p06zr2g0/f1.pdf
    File Function: Document de travail de la DESE numéro G2004-10
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    government debt; intertemporal budget constraint; sustainability; cointegrated VAR model;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E61 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - Policy Objectives; Policy Designs and Consistency; Policy Coordination
    • E62 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - Fiscal Policy; Modern Monetary Theory
    • H62 - Public Economics - - National Budget, Deficit, and Debt - - - Deficit; Surplus
    • H63 - Public Economics - - National Budget, Deficit, and Debt - - - Debt; Debt Management; Sovereign Debt

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nse:doctra:g2004-10. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: INSEE (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/inseefr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.