Typical French propaganda masquerading as thoughtful analysis.
I have gone back to the rapport that Michel Camdessus prepared for the French government in the Fall of 2004. (Michel Camdessus, is the former Head of the IMF and the former Governor of the Bank of France.)
Page 178 shows a graph with the following comments:
"Over the period 1993-2003, US gross domestic product has increased by about 45%, vs. over 35% for the UK, and only 25% for France. This translates into an annual growth rate differential of 1.5 percentage point between the US and France, and 0.9 percentage point between the US and the UK."
I have run the math. The annual GDP growth rate for the 3 countries are:
US: 3.8% UK: 3.0% France: 2.3%
Link to PDF report
Any suggestions for a rebuttal?
The second one is that there is a real difference between 1993-2003 (which my critic quotes) and 1994-2004 (which I use) as a period because 1993 was a bad recession in France, as was 2003. So if you take the period with the two recessions, the comparison becomes skewed. (US recessions were in 1991 and 2001, French ones in 1993 and 2003. So for meaningful comparisons you need to cover a full cycle in both countries).
statistics are very easy to manipulate, you just need to know exactly what you are - and what you are not - talking about... In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
