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Significant social and labour market policy reforms have taken place in most European countries since the beginning of the 1990s. These changes warrant an examination of the dynamics of differing national models from two opposing analytical perspectives: path dependence (signifying that initial differences persist) and convergence (merging towards a single model). This article compares the national models in France and the UK. Fundamental principles of social protection and labour market policy in each country were contrasting in the early 1990s; however, both experienced numerous reforms at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s. We show that although the UK and France stick to differentiated institutional paths, nevertheless, some convergence towards job supply-oriented employment and social policies emerges at the end of the period. Therefore, path dependence theory appears to be highly significant in understanding the dynamics of national regimes, but this reference should be amended to include other forms of change that enable a functional convergence of initially differing systems. Neoinstitutionalist theory, in particular North's work (North, 1990), is likely to underpin this more general framework to include insights into the role of informal factors, especially ideas.

The research program called « Economics of Conventions » aims at revisiting the century- long separation, within mainstream economics, between the issues of coordination, rationality and ethics.
In the realistic world of bounded rationality, the rules are a fundamental means of coordination. An important subset of rules consists in conventions (of which a restrictive definition was provided by the american philosopher David Lewis), but every kind of rule is generally uncomplete, so that it is necessary to resort to collective representations associated with their expected correct application. Since the agreement upon these representations can be viewed as a conventional phenomenon, conventions in economics become quite comprehensive.
From a microeconomic point of view, wages are the results of rules. Does that mean that they are conventional rules ? Many authors have exploited the idea that the amount of wages was determined by a convention. This idea is confronted by insuperable obstacles, suggesting the relation with conventions should be looked for at another level. Any firm, whatever its model of management, rests on a quasi social-contract, linking the dynamics of wages and labour productivity : the wage rules, empirically very diverse, are interpreted through this conventional pact. We define three pure models of business firms (merchant, industial, domestic), or three « dynamic conventional equilibria » . They correspond to three profiles of the employment/wage schedule, decreasing, flat, increasing. From a macroeconomic point of view, the diversity of the employment/wage schedule, at the level of firms, explains the fact that the trend of real wages makes very weak forecasts of the trend of employment -unlike the trend of effective demand. The predictive superiority of this last index comes from the betting system on which all the firms are built, together with the identity which binds the change of the macroeconomic variables. The concept of dynamic macro-equilibrium appropriate to the « Economics of Conventions » splits in two pieces : in the short run, the constancy of unemployment and interest rates, whatever their value, appeal to the neo-keynesian thesis of possible multiple equilibria ; in the long run, we define a « rule-equilibrium », when applying the received rules for modifying transaction confines the sequence of the « short-run dynamic macro-equilibria » within a « corridor », which does not erode the collective agreement upon « normal conjoncture », especially with respect to the goal of full employment.

La révolution des Nouveaux Classiques a brisé le consensus régnant au sein de la synthèse keynésienne, mais a initié un nouveau consensus méthodologique : toute approche macroéconomique se doit de reposer sur les fondements micro-économiques solides de la théorie des choix. Les néo-keynésiens, toujours dans leur lecture légitime de la Théorie Générale en termes de rigidité nominale du salaire, ont tenté d'adapter la micro-économie à la macroéconomie afin de conserver des propriétés keynésiennes. Le présent article tente de montrer comment le courant keynésien s'est perdu en cherchant des fondements micro-économiques à la rigidité du salaire nominal, en ne trouvant que des explications à la rigidité du salaire réel et en tombant finalement sur un « chômage d'équilibre » aux propriétés classiques, bien différent de « l'équilibre de sous-emploi ».

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