Florence Jany-Catrice

Les indicateurs de développement durable

We are presenting material flow accounting and rela ted indicators for an Indian adivasis village in 1983 (Sarowar, Dangs, Gujarat). It gives a point of comparison with modern nation-wide material flow accounting. The aim is to test the feasibility of indicators of dematerialization of the economy in poor economies. We measured the annual material flows within the Sarowar village (670 inhabitants) in 1982-1983. The method was a combination of surveys, real time measurements, ind irect measurements and laboratory dry matter measurements. The results were translate d in o recent concepts of material flow accounting (MFA), and compared with nation-wid e studies. The total material requirement (TMR) of Sarowar (excluding air and wat er), USA, Japan, Germany and The Netherlands is respectively about 5, 84, 46, 86 and 84 tons per capita per year. The input (all biotic materials are expressed in tons o f dry matter per capita per year) totalised 15.8 t DM cap -1 y in Sarowar, which consists mainly of air (11 t cap -1 y) and biotic primary materials (4.1 t DM cap -1 y). The latest was composed of 29% of pastures, 25% of branches for field burning, 35% of fuel wood, 6% fodder, 1% of construction wood and 4% of grains. The outputs (15 .8 t cap y) were dominated by CO2 (15.1 t cap -1 y). In contrast, the output of The Netherlands (66.8 t cap y) is dominated by export with air emissions (19 t cap -1 y), export (16 t cap -1 y) and embedded export (29 t cap -1 y). The apparent eco-efficiency (kg per US dollar, excluding air and water, including hidden flows) is 70, 3, 3, 3 and 3 kg

Capitalizing on Variety: Risks and Opportunities in a New French Social Model

-1 respectively for Sarowar, Japan, USA, Germany and The Netherland s. The corrected eco-efficiency using Purchasing Power Parity is less contrasted wi th respectively 18, 3, 3, 4 and 3 kg

Regional Indicators of Well-Being: The Case of France

. Traditional human ecosystem measurements can serv e as a basic comparison point, and as a test for dematerialization indicators. The limit of the indicator of eco-efficiency Article 3 : Material flow accounting of an Indian v illage 144 resides in the different degrees of monetization of the economies. In less monetized economies, this indicator is highly biased by the u nderlying non-market material flows. We discuss the use of ratios of non-substitutable f actors in dematerialization assessment and we suggest the use of use multi-criteria analys is in tead. Article 3 : Material flow accounting of an Indian v illage

Well-being and the Wealth of Nations: How are They to Be Defined?

Researchers who endeavour to draw up comparative typologies of national models, always experience difficulties in classifying France relative to other developed countries.1 Indeed, whether they focus on production, employment or welfare regimes as a whole, or on the specific components of such regimes such as management systems, corporate governance, social protection, gender contracts, industrial relations or various combinations of these aspects, France is often placed in an ambiguous position reflecting the complexity of its system and the institutional layering that characterizes its political structure.

Employment Systems in Labour-Intensive Activities: the case of retailing in France

The Commission on the Measurement of Performance and Social Progress (Stiglitz et al. 2009) has usefully validated and, above all, given legitimacy to the various criticisms that have been made for several decades now of GDP and economic growth. What is a good society or a good territory? How is its quality of life or its well-being to be assessed? It once seemed that an economic approach to these questions, which are almost philosophical in nature, was broadly sufficient as a means of evaluating the dynamism of territories and, with even greater certainty, their quality. This consensus is being increasingly called into question as a result of a twofold pressure. There is a pressure exerted first by growing awareness of environmental issues, and, second, by increasingly heterogeneous populations. This heterogeneity leads to difficulties in adequately capturing living standards or well-being by ‘average’ measures (of income, consumption, wealth etc.), which have consequently lost some of their meaning (Stiglitz et al. 2009). They are increasingly being debated in international institutions (UNDP 2009; Giovannini et al. 2009), nations, territorial authorities (Jany-Catrice et al. 2009), and even municipalities (see eg. Bardet and Helluin 2010).

Introduction. The Social Sciences of Quantification in France: An Overview

Questions relating to well-being have recently returned to the limelight, notably with the publication in September 2009 of the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi commission report on the measurement of economic performance and social progress. Has this commission changed the terms of the debate on what a societys wealth and well-being are? Has it proposed new paradigms? In accepting the limitations of GDP as a key indicator of well-being, has it developed a new theoretical foundation and new evaluation criteria suited to a very different situation and to very different priorities from those that prevailed at the time when GDP first became established as a measure of national economic performance? These are the main questions raised and reviewed by this paper.

Evaluating public policies or measuring the performance of public services

The retail trade is one of the largest and most labour-intensive sectors of the economy. In the European Union it employs around 14 million people, or more than 9 per cent of the gainfully employed population (Jany-Catrice and Lehndorff, 2004). In France this sector accounts for 8.8 per cent of total employment.1

Creating a ‘Personal Services’ Sector in France

This edited volume contains various contributions from economists, historians, political scientists, sociologists and statisticians, all of whom share the same approach to quantities. Whether they be dealing with national, European or international statistics on the homeless, occupational health or economic governance, they all emphasise the extent to which the numbers are based on conventions and they all call into question their assumed obviousness by examining the exercises in quantification that produced them. To put it another way, they all explore the ‘black boxes’ constituted by the indicators, categories, scoreboards and other accounting or statistical tools that serve both as evidence and as instruments of government. This is the fundamental lesson to be drawn from the work of Alain Desrosieres, statistician, historian and sociologist of statistics, whose work has inspired and guided a large number of studies since the end of the 1990s. The aim of this book is to give a general idea of the research that has its origins in the approach pioneered by this eminent thinker on large numbers and the politics underlying them.

La légitimation académique d’un projet politique. Le cas de la création des « services à la personne »

The idea of performance has become fundamental to the process of judging the effectiveness of actions, public policies and organisations. Performance has become established as a major cognitive reference point and as a coordination mechanism. Many researchers, having carried out empirical work in different areas (education, police, health, research etc.), have concluded that performance has become a key issue in the capitalist economies of the 21st century. However, what performance actually is, what it is said to be and the place it occupies in attitudes and ideas have all changed radically, particularly in recent decades. Public services are no longer immune to this, and it is out of this context, in which the applicability of performance measurement has been extended to the sphere of public economics, that this chapter has emerged. Our aim is to show that the evaluation of public policies is increasingly being organised as a series of mechanisms that are in fact intended to measure the performance of public services. This change has to some extent reduced the scope of evaluation processes by integrating them into what Alain Desrosieres described as ‘realist’ mechanisms, meaning they are characterised by the development of metrology. It has also changed the way in which the reality of effectiveness is brought up to date.

Les nouveaux indicateurs de richesse

For several decades now, household services have been seen by most French governments (whatever their political colour), in terms of their potential as a source of jobs. As described in Chapter 2, public support for the development of household services has taken a number of forms, the most important instrument being a 50% tax reduction on the cost incurred for the purchase of household services, which was introduced in 1991. A further step towards the development of what has been termed Services a la personne (personal services) was taken in 2005, through the launch of an extensive government plan known as the Borloo Plan. Through this plan, the government was pursuing several goals: a social policy objective by establishing a market for care services; a time policy objective (the creation of household employment was intended to ease the constraints on women’s time caused by their domestic responsibilities); and an economic and employment objective, by incentivizing job creation in the domestic sector. In all these aspects, this plan can be regarded as both a continuation of, and a break with, previous policies.