PROPOSALS FOR A HOMOGENEOUS TREATMENT OF HEALTH EXPENDITURES IN THE NATIONAL ACCOUNTS*

International comparisons always raise difficult problems, more especially when they deal with services which are jointly financed by households and government in varying shares with varying procedures in each country. This is obvious in the case of health where the area itself, the principles of economic analysis and the UN method of National Accounting appear to be either vague or unwieldy. Before any proposal it is necessary to review what is involved in the concept of service and the possibility of delimiting the health field inside which economic measures are feasible. Then using the SNA concept and with the help of six interdependent tables we propose two aggregates: the National Medical Consumption and the Current National Expenditure on health. The detailed and harmonized breakdowns of these global results make it possible to compare the structures of values, prices and quantities on an international base.     

THE REDISTRIBUTION OF PUBLIC FUNDS IN FRANCE IN 1965 AND 1970*

The analysis of the redistribution processes via taxation, transfers and collective services raises several methodological problems among which tax incidence is not the least important. Through two hypotheses of incidence of employers’ social contribution the results of the redistribution of public funds lead to four types of conclusions. Despite the fact that about one third of the French national income is involved in the processes there is no clearcut evidence of any redistribution, except for the nonactive population in so far pensions are considered as redistributed. The positive effects which certain mechanisms may have (e.g. income tax…) are to a certain extent offset, or neutralized, by the anti-redistributive effects of indirect taxation and social contributions. It appears that the results of the redistribution not only depend on the institution network, on the evolution of demographic structures and the rate of growth for the various types of income but also on lack of adaptation between the evolution of the three groups of factors. In last analysis, the reason why redistribution does not appear to have more far-reaching consequences is that social policy amalgamates mechanisms often set up in isolation, whereas any reduction in inequalities must be based on a conscious awareness of the inter-dependence of the situations which create and foster these same inequalities.     

A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF HOUSEHOLD CONSUMPTION FINANCED BY INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE RESOURCES, IN FRANCE AND ITALY (1959, 1965, 1969)

In this article the authors anticipate some results of a study carried out in France and in Italy, in the framework of a wider research project aiming at analysing in some depth and at comparing the recent trends and patterns of total household consumption in some capitalist and socialist countries. ¹
The accounting scheme used to arrive at a comprehensive definition of household consumption, inclusive of the "non-market" divisible services produced by public administrations, and to identify the share of this new aggregate which is financed by collective resources, isoutlined in the first section. In the second section, the article shows the growing relative importance of publicly-supported consumption, but it also shows that during the sixties, the overall cost of divisible public services and of social benefits provided in kind or in cash was, in both countries, almost entirely auto-financed by the household sector, via social security contributions and taxes levied on that sector's income and consumption. In the third section, comparative analysis of the recent structural evolution of the "market" and the "non-market" shares of total household consumption points out the similarities and dissimilarities between the patterns and forms of private and public spending in the two countries.
The results of this analysis seem to support the thesis that unless a better integration of social policies with economic growth policies is achieved, it will not be possible to implement rational choices between the "market" and the "non-market" ways of satisfying specific population needs. The authors' conclusion is that under present circumstances, public civil expenditures will continue to rise, both in France and in Italy, more rapidly than total national resources and it will become difficult to balance total receipts and total outlays of the public sector.