Policies·fr_pacte_law_2019

PACTE law — business growth and transformation

FRA·2019 – ·enacted 2019-05-22·La République en Marche / MoDem presidential majoritycandidate

movesproduct market competition↑financial deregulation↑

What the policy did

Loi n° 2019-486 du 22 mai 2019 relative à la croissance et la transformation des entreprises. Raised firm-size thresholds triggering regulatory obligations, streamlined employee-savings and profit-sharing schemes, reformed bankruptcy and share-issuance rules, authorised privatisations of Aéroports de Paris (ADP) and Française des Jeux (FDJ). FDJ privatisation executed November 2019; ADP privatisation halted after a cross-party shared-initiative referendum campaign.

Policy-content fingerprint — what this policy moved, on which axes

Per invariant 3, reforms are scored by what they did on each channel-separated axis, not by the party that enacted them. This fingerprint is how the policy-match engine finds historical analogues.

intended

↑

product market competition

regulatory.product_market_competition

Product-market regulation, entry barriers, licensing burdens, network-industry regulation, price controls.

increased · weak

more competition-friendly (lower entry barriers)

Firm-threshold easing; FDJ privatisation; bankruptcy reforms.

↑

financial deregulation

regulatory.financial_deregulation

Financial-sector regulation — banking separation, capital requirements, cross-border activity rules, derivatives oversight.

increased · weak

tighter financial regulation

Share-issuance and employee-savings simplification.

Enacted by

france_macron_presidency_2017_present

Empirical evidence — linked hypotheses

Explicit links are curated by the author. Inferred links are hypotheses in the library that test the same axes this policy moved — the framework's answer to "what does the data say about a policy like this?".

The Soviet central-planning system, having already exhibited TFP stagnation 1970-1989, underwent a canonical institutional and economic collapse 1989-1998 as plan-enforcement was withdrawn without functioning market institutions in place.

soviet_union_central_planning_gdp_collapse_1989_1991inferred

viaregulatory.product_market_competition

INCONCLUSIVE_DATA_PENDING — no outcome variable loaded; missing: ['derived: count of canonical_metrics with threshold met']

run pending

Across a broad panel of economies 1980-2020, market reforms (privatisation, trade liberalisation, and price decontrol) produce durable gains in real GDP per capita growth only when rule-of-law scores exceed a minimum threshold (WGI Rule of Law > -0.5, approximately the 40th percentile of the global distribution).

rule_of_law_market_reform_complementarityinferred

viaregulatory.product_market_competition

REFUTED — coef=-0.1483 (sign opposite claim +), p=0.00481

refuted

Major episodes of financial deregulation — the 1999 US Gramm-Leach- Bliley repeal of Glass-Steagall, the 1986 UK Financial Services Act ("Big Bang"), Chile's 1974-1981 banking liberalisation, Sweden's late-1980s credit-market liberalisation, and Japan's 1996-2001 Big Bang — are followed within 10 years by higher-than-baseline incidence of banking crises, measured by the Laeven-Valencia Systemic Banking Crisis Database, and by elevated credit-to-GDP gaps per BIS.

financial_deregulation_crisis_vulnerabilityinferred

viaregulatory.financial_deregulationregulatory.product_market_competition

SUPPORTED — sign matches claim +, ATT=+0.04145, p=3.34e-07, N=302, treated_countries=8

supported

Estonia adopted among the most radical market-liberalisation packages of any post-Soviet state — flat tax (26% universal rate, 1994), currency board (EEK pegged to DM/EUR, 1992), rapid privatisation, unilateral free trade, and minimal capital controls — and by 2007 had recovered to Soviet-era GDP per capita levels and substantially exceeded them, while Belarusian and Ukrainian peers had not recovered comparably.

estonia_market_reform_post_soviet_growth_1991_2007inferred

viaregulatory.product_market_competition

PARTIAL — recovery threshold pass=True (year_recovered=1998, 2007 vs 1991 = 70.53282727739165); Baltic−CIS gap pass=False (gap=5.1509956229348575)

partial

Among high-income economies 1990-2020, services-sector competition — measured by low barriers to entry, low incumbent-protection scores, and high churn in retail, transport, communications, and professional services — predicts long-run prosperity (real GDP per capita growth and labour-productivity growth) better than manufacturing-specific industrial policy spending.

sectoral_competition_services_productivityinferred

viaregulatory.product_market_competition

PARTIAL — coef=+0.000842, p=0.361 (above α=0.05); direction inconclusive

partial

In a broad-country panel 1990-2020, mortgage-market liberalisation episodes (abolition of interest-rate caps, reduction of down-payment requirements, privatisation of state mortgage banks, and introduction of securitisation) predict higher homeownership rates, higher residential investment as a share of GDP, and lower housing-rent-to-income ratios, controlling for income growth, demographic structure, and urbanisation.

mortgage_market_liberalisation_homeownership_panelinferred

viaregulatory.product_market_competitionregulatory.financial_deregulation

PARTIAL — coef=+0.972, p=0.606 (above α=0.1); direction inconclusive

partial

Rapid market liberalisation (price decontrol, mass privatisation, trade opening) under weak institutions produces large short-run welfare losses—rising mortality, falling life expectancy, rising inequality, and collapsing output—that may persist for at least a decade, compared to gradual reformers or non-reformers at similar initial income levels.

free_market_shock_therapy_social_costinferred

viaregulatory.product_market_competition

PARTIAL — mean_gap=-3.156, |gap|/pre_sd=1.8, p_perm=0.367; claim direction ambiguous

partial

Following the 1989-1992 collapse of the Soviet bloc, post-communist countries that adopted market reforms rapidly (Poland, Estonia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania — the "fast reformers") experienced faster recovery in life expectancy at birth than countries that reformed slowly or retained state-socialist economic structures (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan — the "slow reformers").

post_soviet_market_reform_life_expectancyinferred

viaregulatory.product_market_competition

INCONCLUSIVE_DATA_PENDING — treatment 'fast_reformer_post_transition' has no within-country variation under country fixed effects

run pending

Similar historical policies

Ranked by axis-fingerprint overlap with this policy. Direction match bolded — those are the closest historical analogues. Shape of the match is what drives policy-outcome comparison, not the country or party label.

Hawke-Keating reform package (1983-1996)

AUS·1983

match

1.4

financial deregulationproduct market competition

Hawke-Keating market reforms — Australia 1983-1996

AUS·1983

match

1.4

financial deregulationproduct market competition

South Korea IMF Programme + structural reforms 1997-1998

KOR·1997