Le rôle des institutions et des normes sociales dans la détermination des politiques économiques

The main purpose of this paper is to understand the course of macroeconomic policy in Europe in the light of several theories which have shown that it was barely adapted to the different shocks that have hinted the European economy in the last two decades. As a result, the performance of the EU economy in general and the Euro area economy in particular have been poor. The mainstream diagnosis of this situation is the structural « sickness » of the European economy, and more specifically of its « big » continental countries. This diagnosis certainly contains bits of truth, and even if it contains also a lot of rhetoric, it has become a common belief. Common beliefs, whatever their theoretical and empirical underpinning, act as social norms. I thus put forward the working hypothesis that a change in social norms may explain the course of macroeconomic policies in Europe — their non reactivity to unemployment and/or soft growth — if we admit that their implicit aim is to show that the only way out are structural reforms to adapt to the new social norm.