Régulation des économies capitalistes et inflation

[eng] The regulation of capitalist economies and inflation. . The aim of this. paper is to try to explain the new pattern of inflation, growth and crises afier the Second World War, i.e. the permanent vises of the general level of prices and the transformation of cyclical crises, the continuing inflation even when growth slows down, the high level of inflation during the present crisis.. The hypothesis, which has been verified by a theoretical and historical study of the long term dynamic of the French Economy, is the following : these changes do not derive from accidental causes which would disturb some invariable System but resuit from the evolution of social relations and economie structures which supports the regulation actually functionning within capitalist économics. Roughly speaking, a « monopolist » régulation would replace a « competitive » regulation. The latter is based upon a precise codification of the relations between wage-earners and firms, a well defined pattern of concurrence between capitalists and a set of interventions of the State which only weakly affects the role of the market, so that price flexibility is an essential element of the adjustment process. On the contrary, within the monopolist regulation, new social institutions involve original mechanicisms of price and wage formation, and monetary creation : to a geater extent, priees tend to be « administred » ; wages are determined taking into account the evolution of the living cost, in a second period, the productivity increases ; a looser monetary contraint is the third change necessary to the real functionning of this regulation.. This framework is shown to be able to explain the inflation trends from 1968 to 1973 and the main features of the present crisis (particularly, the persistence of inflation within the recession, and the absence of a cumulative contraction of the production). At last, some further researches are proposed concerning the theoretical representations of the two re(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)