Economy Finance Breakfast with Guy Abeille

The 3% and European public finance criteria: origin, basis, reform

Of all the rules that have governed the common governance of the euro since 1991 and the Maastricht Treaty, the 3% public deficit limit is the one that is most often, if not exclusively, taken up in public discourse. It is the criterion most often, if not exclusively, used in public discourse.

And yet it dates neither from 1991, nor from Maastricht. It was born in France, in 1981, in an office of the Ministry of Finance. A young ENSAE graduate, Guy Abeille was there. In this lecture, he will recount the story of its empirical, contingent genesis, and the circumstances of its reappearance in the Maastricht Treaty. He will question its economic foundations, as well as those of the associated 60% debt threshold and structural deficit reduction criteria. But beyond their history, large and small, and the critical questioning of each of them, there is the question of the usefulness of these criteria for budgetary and economic policy, and therefore of their eventual abandonment and replacement by other, more relevant rules. Their transformation raises the very question of the "completion" of the euro zone.

Guy Abeille is an alumnus of ENSAE (class of 1974). He was in charge of the Budget Department of the French Ministry of Finance at the time of the introduction of the 3% rule, where he was responsible for monitoring the execution of the State Budget and forecasting the year-end balance on an ongoing basis. He is periodically interviewed in the media on the history of the 3% rule and on European public finance criteria, their validity and their desirable evolution, both in France and abroad.He is regularly interviewed in the media on the history of the 3% rule and on European public finance criteria, their validity and their desirable evolution, both in newspapers and on radio and television, in France and abroad (particularly Germany and Italy).