Economics

Les frontières troubles de la politique économique

Sep 19, 2013 Michael Spence

MILAN – Partout dans le monde, les politiques adoptées, la technologie et les processus d'apprentissage avancé se combinent pour faciliter les interactions économiques au niveau international. Tous les indicateurs le montrent, qu'il s'agisse du chiffre d'affaires du commerce mondial rapporté au PIB mondial, du flux de capitaux rapporté au montant du capital mondial, ou encore d'autres indicateurs.

Mais les politiques économiques sont établies au niveau national (à quelques notables exceptions comme les négociations commerciales et les enquêtes sur le financement du terrorisme ou le blanchiment d'argent) et sont destinées à servir l'intérêt national. Pourtant elles affectent de plus en plus les économies des autres pays, ainsi que le systéme mondial, ce qui donne naissance à ce que l'on pourrait qualifier d'effets externes - les conséquences de décisions politiques en dehors de l'objectif ciblé.

Ce phénomène a toujours existé, mais à une petite échelle. Il prend de l'importance en raison d'un monde de plus en plus connecté, il est donc de plus en plus difficile à gérer. L'optimisation de la mondialisation nécessite une autorité politique mondiale qui n'existe pas.

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Michael Spence

Writing for PS since 2008
167 Commentaries

Michael Spence, a Nobel laureate in economics, is Professor of Economics Emeritus and a former dean of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Senior Adviser to General Atlantic, and Chairman of the firm’s Global Growth Institute. He is Chair of the Advisory Board of the Asia Global Institute and serves on the Academic Committee at Luohan Academy. He is a former chair of the Commission on Growth and Development and the author of The Next Convergence: The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World (Macmillan Publishers, 2012).

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Stamatis Kavvadias Sep 22, 2013

"Short-term growth slowdown," cannot be the only consequence of capital-flow reversal from emerging markets. So called, savers will have to place their excesses somewhere, most likely causing inflation (because of "deficient domestic aggregate demand relative to domestic capacity"), or accept the losses of stagnant capital.

It is more likely that capital of US "savers" (especially the part accumulated based on QE) will keep seeking returns in emerging markets, since, the hit taken and debt accumulated by advanced economies in the aftermath of the crisis, is not likely to go away any time soon. Stagnation and unemployment in advanced economies is likely to persist, with no exit visible.
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Procyon Mukherjee Sep 21, 2013

Do not know what Coase would have said on this line of thought, but clearly Michael Spence has brought in a very important point that mounting externalities cannot be 'internalized' through a model of coordination and reciprocity that domestic policy instruments intend to achieve in the different geographies of this world.

Indeed we are entering new unknown areas, where the need for new economic models is rising that balances the ill-effects of an impending regulatory deluge, while bringing out the positives that the market mechanism provides.
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