ABSTRACT
If we compare France’s economic position in the late 1940s and early 1950s with its position at the start of the twenty-first century, we perceive striking differences in its economic structure. From the economic point of view, France in 1945 resembled two countries, a kind of “dual economy’, the one industrialized but the other still largely governed by activities closer to traditional rural societies. The country’s considerable achievement since then is to have succeeded in modernizing its economy into a system based first on industry and subsequently on a powerful service sector with a highly trained work-force able to compete with countries such as Germany in terms of labour productivity, open to international trade and increasingly integrated into the European economic sphere. This was accomplished by means of a specific French model of economic growth variously described as ‘state Fordism’ or ‘the Colbertist model of an administrated debt economy’. 16
