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By Bruno COLMANT, Member of the Académie Royale de Belgique
Public debt has been rising inexorably for several years. Why is this? It goes back half a century, when European states, shaken by multiple currency crises, two oil shocks, and a mutation of the industrial model, implemented a policy of demand stimulation designed to combat the vicissitudes of economic crises. And even if some years were prosperous in the meantime, other shocks jeopardized budgetary stability and hence public debt. Just think of the banking crisis of 2008, followed by the sovereign debt crisis that put the euro at stake, the Covid crisis, and more recently a wave of inflation linked, among other things, to the Russian-Ukrainian war.
But even if the economy gets back...
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