After World War I, the specificity of the French tradition gradually faded.
However, this evolution was slow, as slow as the transformation of the relations between economists of different nations. During the inter-war period, Frenchspeaking economists increasingly looked abroad: they had Fisher and Keynes as references, and the future professors who were trained in the seminars of Gaetan Pirou (1886-1946) at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes studied foreign economists (1928-1938).
After 1945, this trend became more pronounced and contacts between economists of different nationalities multiplied. From 1970 onwards, many French economists published texts written with foreign colleagues, so that international cooperation took on another dimension. But even when they looked abroad and their contributions blended with those of other countries, French economists remained at the vanguard.At the same time, there was a change in the topics covered. Monetary issues, exchange rate problems and the analysis of international transfers, which had been the favourite subjects of economists before World War II, took a back seat after 1945, compared to new research topics which came to the fore. By providing proofs of optimality and the existence of a Walrasian equilibrium, Maurice Allais (1911-2010) and Gerard Debreu (1921-2004) revived interest in general equilibrium research. The nationalisation of many companies and the introduction of an indicative planning system led them to work on public economics and growth. World War II marked a shift in the evolution of economic thought in France, around which this epilogue is organised.
This chapter is not intended to be a survey of the literature in the history of economic thought on the authors and currents in question, but to give a general overview of French economic thought after 1914 by providing synoptic insights into the hypotheses, methods and results obtained by the French-speaking economists. In this respect, it will be somewhat different from the other chapters in its orientation and its synthetic form.
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