ABSTRACT
The government takes nine months to prepare the annual budget, producing a finely balanced product of economic forecasts (which have the genius of being invariably wrong), rationally quantifiable models (whose ‘rationality’ often disguises some very irrational political choices) and nice calculations of party and pressure group interests. Parliamentarians then have three months to debate it. They suffer both from an overload of information (receiving each year over 120 separate official budget documents representing some 30,000 pages, as well as 9,000 pages of reports and opinions produced by themselves) and a dearth of it (all too often crucial data, like year-on-year comparisons, transfer of unused credits from one year to the next, matching funds from elsewhere, or transfers between ministries, are not available). Few governments have looked kindly upon parliamentary amendments to their delicately tuned document. The debates on the budget for 2000, for example, changed the disposal of just 7.6 billion francs out of a total of 1,500 billion. Even then, it should be borne in mind that most budget amendments originate with the government (one recent study showed that government spokesmen regularly exceeded their allotted time in the finance committee by over 100 per cent), and that the government is always free to invoke the vote bloqué procedure, or even Article 49-3. Implementation of the budget largely escapes parliament. Changed circumstances may lead ministers to alter details of their expenditure. Significant spending items have been ‘debudgetised’, or moved to external bodies. Parliament’s control over these, and over France’s still numerous public and semi-public enterprises (numbering over 600 at their peak in the 1980s) is largely fictitious.
