Critères d'endettement public et vieillissement démographique: une approche par l'équilibre général calculable

At the time of an increasing movement toward european integration, several countries experience a worrying public debt situation. One of the main challenges for policymakers is then to reduce the budget deficit and public debt, especially when the Treaty of Maastricht fixes the desirable Deficit/GNP and Debt/GNP ratios to 3 and 60 percents respectively. It has also been argued that the expected effect of ageing on the level of social expenditures calls for an immediate action. In this paper, we investigate these questions in a computable overlapping generations model of the Belgian economy. We first show that the respect of the deficit criterion does not imply the realization of the debt criterion. It also appears that long run but moderated policies, minimizing welfare changes and deadweight losses, are preferable to violent tax shocks.