What are the characteristics of the French public services ? The evolution of the real frontier between the public and private sectors and its theoretical rationalization are tracked. During the liberalism period, regulation and public property were not to be mixed. The government influence has never stopped growing through the multiplication of its missions, even though they were implemented by the private sector. The theoretical technical criteria (increasing returns, etc) that were used in the mid-twentieth century to justify the extension of the public property, have only served to rationalize the objectives of a « visionary » State. Nowadays, the same criteria, still unduly neutral, are used to explain the contraction of the French public sector. The visionary State disappears and with him all the Society Projects that make the specificity of the « service public à la française ».

This article offers a micro-macro-economic approach for the long term analysis of health care sector and health care policies. The medical supply behavior is built using a «working-time allocation choice» between various qualities of care ; this choice is connected to a decomposition of health care in two activities: one effective and another non-effective («induced demand»). A technical progress is also introduced in the model, taking into account the specificity of medical progress («extension of range»). These micro-economic foundations of health supply are then integrated in a model of growth with capital accumulation and overlapped generations (Solow-Diamond type). The conclusions concern the evolution of health expenditures, the population? welfare and capital accumulation, with respect to different health care policies.

[eng] US fiscal policy under Clinton administration Helene Baudchon, Jerome Creel, Vincent Touze et Bruno Ventelou This paper investigates the last ten years of US fiscal policy with three levels of reading. At the macroeconomic level, the current federal budget surplus has resulted from the US economie growth, from a good policy mix, and from a commitment to a balanced structural budget which emerged at the beginning of the nineties. At the institutional level, several Acts introduced caps on discretionary spending and increasing taxes. We show that the reduction in defense spending has explained 80% of the outlays slowdown and that economic growth has had non-linear effects on tax revenues. Last, using a political-economists' view, we develop some alternatives on « what to do with the surplus ». Indeed, many constraints, be they social or political-economic, intervene in the choice between reducing taxes, reducing the public debt, or increasing federal spending. JEL codes : E 62, E 65, H 61

[fre] Au cours de la décennie qui vient de s'écouler, le paysage budgétaire américain a radicalement changé. Le solde public fédéral est ainsi passé d'un déficit historique de 290 milliards de dollars en 1992 à un excédent de 124 milliards en 1999 (soit 1,4 % du PIB). De tels chiffres, inhabituels pour les États-Unis, s'appuient sur la combinaison d'une croissance très rapide des recettes fiscales et d'un infléchissement dans l'évolution des dépenses. D'une part, une conjoncture particulièrement dynamique s'est trouvée associée à une politique monétaire plutôt accommodante. D'autre part, structurellement, un ajustement vers un solde équilibré a été engagé dès le début des années 1990. En comparaison avec les efforts d'assainissement un peu plus tardifs des pays européens, l'ajustement américain apparaît plus progressif, quoique d'un niveau extrêmement important : entre 1992 et 1999, un peu plus de la moitié de l'amélioration du solde effectif est due à l'effort structurel. [...]