Les stratégies des compagnies minières du Nord-Pas-de-Calais

This study aims at confronting a formal approach derived from the New Industrial Economics and an historical case: the Nord-Pas-de-Calais (NPC) coal industry during the interwar period. This work is based on an unpublished statistical material partially extracted from internal archives of NPC coal companies. Why should we be interested in the strategies of cooperation developed by the NPC coal companies during the interwar period ? At that time, the industry shows specific features at various levels : technical (importance of fixed costs in the mining industries, importance of a continuous coal exploitation), geographic (location of the main coal-basin near foreign competitors) but also strategic (pursuit of a policy of national energy independence, deficit in coal products, competition with foreign producers). These factors make coordination of the coal companies a key element for the conservation of the national coal production capacity. Even if this study is about history, this question is nevertheless still very present in our days, an evidence of it being the emergence of oligopolistic structures convenient to the development of cooperative agreements. Throughout this work, we try to show the interest of the joint use of economics and history. Beyond the results put in evidence, our comment aims at underlining that economists cannot abstract from the reality and thus from the past. Such a position excludes by no means the appeal to the theoretical approach. However, to consider economics as a purely deductive science amounts to cut it from the empirical world . The structure of the work permits a reading at various levels. The formal part can be skipped without damaging the general understanding. This book may arouse some interest among historians about the subject of the study, as well as among applied economists about both the methodological approach and the econometric techniques that we use (structural, VAR models, Granger causality tests and cointegration tests). Many theoretical results derived from New Industrial Economics are taken into account, in order to be used by economists interested by formal approaches. Finally, the statistical series used in the study appear in appendix for an eventual use by applied economists.