Revue - Revue française des Finances Publiques n°165-2024 - 19

An incomplete governance model for public finances
XVII
of a generation the profession of public accountant and the associated
law have undergone a real revolution.
The result of this process, which, as we have said, has been going
on for almost fifty years, is a heterogeneous public financing model,
the coherence of which is particularly arbitrary and difficult to identify.
Indeed, throughout the last five decades, alongside the dismantling
of the public financing model of the Trente Glorieuses years (from
1945 to 1975), another model, rooted in liberal conceptions, emerged.
Yet paradoxically, this model, born out of the crises of the 1970s, was
itself challenged by the crises of the 2000s, which revived the need for
state intervention. As a result, in terms of both ideas and facts, it is
difficult to develop a coherent vision of the public financing system. In
other words, no model has yet prevailed.
Nevertheless, new institutions are being set up, the flagship being
a dual reform that presents the budget as a series of programmes
and establishes a public accounting process built on the corporate
accounting model. This is leading to the implementation of managerial
practices that provide a solid basis for public financial control.
These reforms go far beyond a simple change in procedures, they
mark a shift to another paradigm. They are the product of a process
of radical transformation of the economic and political model of the
1960s-1970s - a transformation towards the appropriation of corporate
management and governance models and therefore of an economic
culture, by all actors, politicians and managers involved in fiscal
processes.
The reforms include structural elements for the development of a
public financing governance model but remain confined to the sphere
of management. They are not enough to build a complete model that
would involve establishing a link with strategic management. In this
regard, a systemic approach should be adopted and comprehensive
regulation should be implemented, which would involve resolving the
issue of separating decision-making into multiple autonomous budgets
without going back to the centralised state of yesteryear.
It must also be stressed that links are not being made between the
new institutions and the old ones that are still in place. They are rooted
in very different models and do not slot together. It is to be feared,
under these conditions, that the disparate elements of both will find
themselves trapped in their contradictions and in the prevarication
of political decision-makers, with the risk that they will be dragged
into a whirlwind resulting in a nihilistic logic that will be fatal to the
survival of the State. The new public management approach is not
RFFP n° 165 - Février 2024
Revue - Revue française des Finances Publiques n°165-2024

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