Postlude: After World War I

This chapter aims at giving a general overview of French economic thought after the First World War, focusing in a very synoptic way on the specific results obtained by French economists. In the interwar period, decisive contributions to economic analysis were made by French economists, as well as in the field of monetary analysis (by Jacques Rueff, Charles Rist, and Bertrand Nogaro among others) and equilibrium theory (by René Roy, Robert Triffin or François Divisia). After 1945, and especially from the 1970s, the specificity of the French tradition progressively vanished. As elsewhere, economic research centres emerged, and economic expertise developed, particularly in ministries and public statistical agencies. Maurice Allais and Gérard Debreu defined what would become the ulterior general framework for numerous general equilibrium models. Alternative models of non-walrasian equilibria also developed, along with robust heterodox currents. Marcel Boiteux, Jean-Jacques Laffont and Jean Tirole took public economics to its most sophisticated level (concerning, especially, the pricing of public utilities, incentive problems and agency relations in regulated markets), while finally, French economists were also at the international forefront of work on inequality and social justice (Serge-Christophe Kolm, Thomas Piketty and Esther Duflo).