Application de la méthode de la comptabilité générationnelle à la France. Quelques facteurs d'instabilité des résultats

Generational accounting, initiated in the early 90?s, intends to take the government long term financial liabilities into account. Indeed, these are not included in the standard measure of the budget deficit. Our calculations, using this technique, indicate that French generational policy is imbalanced against future generations. Current policies in France can not be sustained without requiring future generations to pay higher net taxes over their lifetime than current generations pay. If this generational imbalance, mainly resulting from demographic evolutions, is not contested, its precise size would depend on a great number of assumptions. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the impact of these assumptions, by comparing the different French studies using generational accounting. We show that the generational imbalance may vary from 1 to 4, according to the assumptions relative to the age and sex profiles of taxes and transfers, the treatment of the debt interest payment, the distribution of education expenditures, the treatment of governments?s investment spendings, the measure of the net wealth of the government, and the evolution of age and sex profiles of taxes and transfers. Classification JEL : E62, H55, H60, J18, M40