It is not to the vocabulary that is ambiguous

The French economy is a little better this year. Can discuss figures, quibbling over statistics, point the social treatment of the unemployment. But the revival is perceptible beyond accounts in thousand small daily indices. After all, even assisted jobs and major work in this case those urban renewal can have their usefulness to support the economy and morale in times of economic depression. From this point of view, the Government has not played contra-cyclical policy.

But can it stop there and consider that everything is resolved Already, a few clouds darken the horizon. The latest figures are less good on real estate and industrial production. And if the profits of large companies continue their flight, they are more and more disconnected from the national economic situation. The question is. At the time no one knows whether things will go better or worse. However, what is certain is that, since twenty-five years, economic policy and the debate on the economy is are locked up in the conditions.

The country took the habit to live to the rhythm of the ups and downs of the activity. With this paradox that the commentary on the economy has invaded the French economic scene at the as macroeconomic policy it was deserted. Beyond speech agreed of successive Governments and some accompanying measures, it is expected the improvement from the outside. On facing the rebound American or Asian, German recovery or the end of the European depression. Basically, it seems that we imagined more be craftsmen of our growth and our prosperity. It must be said that the "policy mix", to talk about such as economists, is reduced to its simplest expression between fiscal locked by gabegies past and the stability pact, and monetary policy in the hands of a European Central Bank which interested in inflation.

It is not to the vocabulary that is ambiguous. Talk about the resumption of growth on a rebound of GDP over a few months is an abuse of language. Not only because the activity is difficult to measure in an economy increasingly more intangible, but also because the growth is quite another thing. It is a deep, lasting phenomenon which expresses a report at the time, the nature, to oneself, a dialectic of the old and new, a system of values tended to the overflow itself, the invention, the faith in the future, training of all the company scrambles to the weight of the past and the suffocation of the present to plan ahead. Isn't that a matter of statistics, it is a State of mind, an intellectual and moral disposition which is felt everywhere, in art, thought, action. Growth, is when the whole society starts to believe that anything is possible, it is a perpetual movement, boldness on precaution, the explosion of what Freud called the pulse of life, the vital impetus which goes across, the triumph of the spirit of conquest. Confinement in the economic climate, it is the confinement in the present and the foam of waves that masks deep currents.

If growth does not provides, it is preparing, in the reform. But how prepare reform out of Ms if it is trapped in the situation which has also just How reform if macroeconomic policy tightened not embrace of conditions to allow time for reform Be preferred the offer on demand This is not really the subject. Growth, is the simultaneous training of supply and demand, the success of the passage between two worlds. Entering into the knowledge society, the economy of innovation and globalization, there is the problem. We are like the France of 14th century, anxious between the middle ages ending and the coming Renaissance. It is, more than to conditions, more than economy: of civilization. The battle of the growth will win on all fronts. This is the challenge of policy at the beginning of the 21st century.