Les collectivités locales peuvent-elles restaurer leur capacité de financement ? Les enseignements du modèle macroéconomique APUL

摘要

Since 2004, French local governments have been running deficits and have moved deeper into debt, making it harder for general government to comply with the fiscal rules of the Maastricht and Amsterdam Treaties. The growing concern over the local governments’ fiscal sustainability calls for a sounder understanding of their fiscal behavior. Our paper provides a new macroeconomic model of French local government finances consistent with the “ golden rule ” imposed on every local government in the country. The model assumes that local budgets are prepared under the hypothesis of tax-rate stability and are balanced through a trade-off between investment expenditures and borrowings. Our empirical estimates of the model for the period 1978-2003 confirm the theoretical assumption. We run the model through various ex ante and ex post simulation exercises. The first result confirms that in a context of moderate economic growth, moderate inflation, and interest rates, French local-government budgets are likely to reach equilibrium by 2010. The simulation exercises also confirm (1) the pro-cyclical behavior of local fiscal policy, as the acceleration of economic growth increases the budget surplus or reduces the deficit ; (2) the positive net effect of higher interest rates on local fiscal positions, as the dampening effect of weaker investment demand exceeds the rise in interest payments ; (3) the negative effect of an increase in prices of investment goods relative to GDP prices.