Comment - Productivity slowdown and loss of allocative efficiency: A French disease?

Abstract

[eng] The article by Cette, Corde and Lecat presented in this special issue brings new stylised facts and a rich and fruitful discussion on the causes of the slowdown of productivity growth observed in France over the last decade. The facts established are solid. They back up the hypothesis that this slowdown is not a cyclical phenomenon, linked to the crisis of 2008, but is a structural phenomenon whose causes remain difficult to pin down. The authors put forward as a possible explanation the difficulties in reallocating resources between companies, linked . notably to rigidities on labour markets and to regulations on goods markets. This comment aims to explain why the facts highlighted by Cette, Corte and Lecat are not sufficient to exclude other, alternative explanations which bring, in a more direct way, the shocks of globalisation and digitalisation into play. It draws conclusions from them in the perspective of future lines of research and recommendations of economic policy, in particular keeping aggregate productivity, not productivity at the frontier, as a target of policy action, and also considering, for each action, the risk of impoverishing reallocations.