Market Empowerment of the Patient: The French Experience

Through analysis of the French experience, this article explores the way economic policy has sought to encourage active, well-informed patients by giving them market power. The new status of the patient as consumer is based on two foundations: the endeavour to build a healthcare market and the activation of demand-based policies. The keystone of this new system is a conception of the market as a process constructed by economic policy. Recent measures such as the standardization of care and the introduction of incentives to respect a treatment pathway then constitute effective levers to establish a free-market rationale.     

Combining an inter-sectoral carbon tax with sectoral mitigation policies: Impacts on the French forest sector

As France works out its plan to tackle climate change issues, questions are arising in the forest sector as to how sectoral mitigation programs such as those designed to enhance fuelwood consumption or to stimulate in-forest carbon sequestration may coincide with an inter-sectoral program such as an economy-wide carbon tax. This paper provides insights into this question by exploring the impacts of (1) a combination of a carbon tax and a fuelwood policy, and (2) a combination of a carbon tax and a sequestration policy on (i) the economy of the forest sector, and (ii) the dynamics of the forest resource. To do this, we used a modified version of the French Forest Sector Model (FFSM) and carried out simulations on a 2020 time horizon. Basing our analysis on the fuelwood sector, we showed that wood producers always benefit from the combination of a carbon tax with either a fuelwood policy or a sequestration policy at the national level. Conversely, and although it favors wood products instead of non-wood substitutes, a carbon tax always decreases consumer surpluses by increasing wood product prices. As a consequence, the combination of a carbon tax with sectoral policies is likely to raise questions about the political economy of the mitigation program. This is particularly true in the case of a combination of a carbon tax with a sequestration policy, which already decreases consumer surpluses. We eventually showed that by increasing transport costs between domestic regions, the carbon tax reallocates production patterns over French territory which could lead to the necessity of a regional breakdown of policy-mixes in the forest sector.     

The differing and mediating roles of trust and relationship commitment in service relationship maintenance and development

Relationship maintenance (customer retention and exclusivity) and development (increased service usage and cross-buying) are top priorities in Customer Relationship Management. This paper examines how service companies can effectively influence customer patronage behaviors by leveraging overall customer satisfaction, trust and relationship commitment. Using a longitudinal design over a two-year period, we merge survey metrics with actual patronage behaviors taken from a bank’s database. We show that relationship commitment just enhances retention and exclusivity while trust directly influences service usage and cross-buying. As a consequence, trust appears to be highly critical for service relationship development and company profits. Furthermore, trust and relationship commitment mediate the entire impact of satisfaction which appears as a necessary but not sufficient condition for relationship maintenance and development. Satisfaction, and more generally service evaluations, must be efficiently converted into trust and relationship commitment before providing business results. Finally, we establish the temporal antecedence and the predictive power of trust and relationship commitment. Relationship commitment in year t predicts the number of service providers in year t + 1 (exclusivity vs. polygamy), while trust in year t predicts the number of bank products (cross-buying) as well as the service usage level in year t + 1. We then discuss managerial implications for customer relationship maintenance and development.     

Further education and training in the french public sector

Since 1989, the French public sector has imitated the private sector's further education and training mechanisms. But today, it seems that just as in the private sector, the training policies in the public sector have severe limitations. Based on a case study of a large public research institute and on a national survey making it possible to compare the private and public sectors, the paper studies the further education and training policies and their links with the organizational needs. In the public sector, the difficult balance between individual's choices and strategic management comes on the one hand from the specificities of the administrative rules of human resource management, and on the other hand from the unions' power and strategies. Faced with new challenges (demographic evolutions, decentralisation, new demands from the users of public services), the French public sector must develop new training policies.     

Estimating Armington elasticities for sawnwood and application to the French Forest Sector Model

Domestic and foreign forest products consumptions are considered imperfectly substitutable in the French Forest Sector Model (FFSM). This assumption is justified by product heterogeneities that depend on production places, by the consumers habits or by the market structure. It leads us to implement the international trade in the FFSM via the Armington's theory of the demand for products distinguished by place of production. In this paper we propose a calibration of Armington's elasticities of substitution between French and foreign forest products. System-GMM estimators are applied to identify robust parameters using a panel data from France customs service.     

The European sectoral social dialogue: questions of representation and membership

In the debates on the European social dialogue as a potential level of supranational industrial relations, the key questions of representations and mandates are often neglected. To what extent can the European sectoral social dialogue act for national constituencies across 27 Member States in the perspective of collective action by European associations? This article addresses this question by the means of three dimensions: the representation of heterogeneous members, the various degrees of national players' commitment in the European committees and finally, the definition of a common agenda among members.     

Multivariate models with dual cycles: implications for output gap and potential growth measurement

Structural time series models applied to the factor inputs of a production function often lead to small output gaps and to erratic measures of potential growth. We introduce a dual cycle model which is an extension to the multivariate trend plus cycle model with phase shifts à la Rünstler. The dual cycle model is a combination of two types of model: the trend plus cycle model and the cyclical trend model, where the cycle appears in the growth rate of a variable. This property enables hysteresis to be taken into account. Hysteresis is likely to show up in unemployment, but it can also affect the capital stock due to the existence of long investment cycles. In the proposed model, hysteresis may affect all the factor inputs of the production function and phase shifts are extended to the dual cycles. Genuine measures of potential growth can be computed that are hysteresis-free and less prone to volatility. A complementary measure of the output gap that takes hysteresis into account can be derived.     

Goals,rationality criteria and market functioning ∗

The behaviours of economic operators may be directed by goals and rationality criteria other than those postulated by neoclassical theory. Under certain conditions, the existence of deviant goals and rationality criteria, far from being eliminated by the process of ‘natural selection’, has a profound effect on market functioning. It alters the ‘natural selection’ criterion and thereby influences the market trajectory. It can also favour the development of specific mechanisms of co-ordination. Our hypothesis is illustrated by an analysis of the cultural markets.