"At the end of the current five-year presidential term and the “Trente-Six Dispendieuses” far-reaching public expenditure reforms will be required. These will be all the more painful as they are far too late."

“Misapprehensions about the crucial question of whether Management constitutes a scientific discipline stem, in my view, from the multiplicity of perspectives involved: theoretical; normative; technical/educational; and practical. This makes is far too easy for critics to deride practical advice developed in this field, something they assimilate far too readily with ready-made solutions, ignoring the epistemological vision underlying all management studies.”

“In developped countries, successive governments have always acted like firemen putting out fires instead of architects designing new buildings. The tax loopholes they have created are responses to emotions provoked by a given event, or an attempt to ease social tension caused by taxpayer exasperation . Any rational global management policy must satisfy two imperatives: simplicity; and stability.”

“Thirty years of lax budget policy marked by soaring public spending in the 1980’s, the happy-go-lucky attitude of the 1990’s and finally, a policy of procrastination in the 2000’s characterised by the development of creative budgetary marketing strategies exclusively destined to delay the socially and politically painful moment of addressing the accounts.”

“Despite a relative control over expenditure in 2013, the persistence of a very high public deficit was mainly due to an unprecedented and unexpected drop in tax revenue which confirms the existence of a tax tolerance threshold, specific to each country, and which may have been reached in France. Above this threshold, any tax increase has a counterproductive effect as compulsory taxes stifle activity by further weakening the economy’s growth potential.”

“In the developed world taxation is always a political construct, a living organism that is always changing due to endless modifications imposed by lawmakers who are themselves sensitive to the public mood and to changes in social ideology. This is a haphazard scaffolding without an architect that lacks rationality and coherency, with tax and social expenditures- referred to here as social and tax expenditures - constituting a superstructure that is all the more complex given its roots in a tax system whose benchmark standards are subject to innumerable exceptions.”

“The government is making another mistake, although purely ideological this time, by thinking about the responsibility pact in terms of contracts that would give rise to reciprocal concessions from companies. Indeed, the government cannot negotiate with companies because the decisions of business leaders are always individual. They are not civil servants working to orders, but free and lucid agents who make their decisions, particularly on investment and job creation, by individually assessing their risks based on the stability of the environment and the favourable outlook for returns on investment. By contrast, an effective government can, and must, create the right circumstances for investment decisions to generate the conditions for growth.”