PARIS (AFP) — French President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Tuesday he had recruited two Nobel economists to work on changes in the way French growth is calculated to include quality-of-life factors.
Sarkozy said at his first press conference since being elected in May on a platform to reform and free up the economy that Amartya Sen of India had agreed to give advice and that US economist Joseph Stiglitz had agreed to chair a committee of experts.
Sarkozy said "we must change the way we measure growth," argued that thought had to be given to the way gross national product was calculated to take account of the quality of life in France.
New indices would improve the impression of growth performance among French people "who can no longer accept the growing gap between statistics that show continuing progress (in growth) and the increasing difficulties they are having in their daily lives."
Sarkozy said he had asked the two Nobel prize winners, "who have done a lot of work on these questions," to lead the analysis.
One of the reasons often given by Europeans buying homes, or second homes, in France, is the quality of life, an aspect of the economy that does not figure directly in statistics measuring gross domestic and gross national product.
Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2001, is a former World Bank Vice President and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Bill Clinton. He is currently a professor at Columbia University in New York and has become known for his sharp criticism of the International Monetary Fund.
In recent years he has also become a proponent for change in the way globalisation is implemented as well as a critic of its failure to improve the lot of the poor in developing countries.
He has likewise been a vocal spokesman against agricultural subsidies in developed countries, blamed for harming the interests of poor farmers on world markets, and has said developing nations should be allowed to provide government support to their industrial sectors.
Armatya Sen won the Nobel prize in 1998 for work on developing economies and well-being in India.
France has struggled for years to raise its rate of economic growth, preferring broadly to use the fruit of growth as a means to reform rather implementing difficult changes that would stimulate activity.
Sarkozy, when finance minister under the previous centre-right administration when Jacques Chirac was president, commissioned a report from former IMF head Michel Camdessus on reforms needed to raise growth in France.
Camdessus made many proposals but essentially argued that France had to reform its labour laws and the French had to work harder.
More recently, as president, Sarkozy has recruited Jacques Attali, a former guru of the socialist economic policies of President Francois Mitterrand, to report on specific measures to galvanize momentum.
But Sarkozy's election promises to reform the economy so that it provides improved living standards is running into trouble from high oil and food prices.
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