The European Union’s raison d’être is guaranteeing its citizens a lasting peace. This ultimately hinges on its member states enjoying a shared economic prosperity – the operative word being ‘shared’. More...

Immigration is arguably one of the most contentious issues today in the West. Even young countries that have been built by newcomers and have thrived on immigration, such as Australia and the US, are increasingly questioning whether open borders are such a good thing. More...

Making our democracies more transparent and helping citizens play an active role in them are central challenges facing our societies today. The Open Government Partnership (OGP), which has 75 member countries, brings together people from all levels of government, civil society, the corporate world, academia and the media to work towards these goals. More...

Growth and productivity in most developed economies have been trending down for a long time. It is not easy to assign relative weights to the different factors that might lie behind this slowdown, nor is it easy to determine if it will become a permanent feature of our economies for the foreseeable future. More...

How inheritances and gifts are taxed is set to become a major issue for French society in the coming years. Not only is the passing of the populous baby-boom generation going to lead to a considerable spike in inheritances, but over the past twenty years private wealth has increased at a much faster rate than income, with the well-o holding the largest share of the pie. More...

France Stratégie economists Haithem Ben Hassine and Claude Mathieu have carried out an assessment of France’s 71 business clusters, launched in 2004, and their impact on participating companies’ R&D activities. They found that the clusters began to reap the benefits of the policy early on, seeing an increase in total R&D spending by 2007 and in self-financed R&D by 2009. More...

Against a backdrop of sluggish growth in Europe and the rest of the world, the French economy is facing weakness on both the demand and supply sides. The risk today is this situation will become self-perpetuating, causing long-lasting damage to the French economy. More...

Despite historically low unemployment and a strong budget surplus, a large number of low-wage earners and a high relative poverty rate paint a mixed picture for Europe’s largest economy and point to an uncertain future. More...

The energy crisis of the 1970s and the subsequent stagflation and recession that hit Western economies at the end of the decade and in the early 1980s laid the Keynesian view low. Policy makers began to see government spending as ineffective and even counterproductive when it came to boosting flagging output. They maintained the solution lay in just the opposite – unfettered markets. In other words, they advocated limited government, privatization, deregulation of markets, free trade and fiscal austerity. More...