Maxime Menuet, research associate at the Economics of Defence Chair - IHEDN, publishes an article on public debt and social conflicts in the journal Social Choice and Welfare.
Maxime Menuet, Associate Researcher at the Chair, co-wrote with Patrick Villieu and Marcel Voia an article entitled « Does public debt secure social peace? A diversionary theory of public debt management« . It was published online by the academic journal Social Choice and Welfare.
This article analyses strategic use that can be made of the public debt. Contrary to the conventional view that politicians can use public debt to «tie the hands» of their successors, the article shows that a government in power can use this strategy against itself and take advantage of it in the run-up to elections. By doing so, it reduces the basis for future social conflict and benefits from social peace during its term of office, which increases its chances of re-election.
Moreover, in the case of foreign or external public debt, the outgoing president can strategically divert future social conflicts towards a common enemy (foreign creditors).
Thus, by increasing the public debt before the election, the holder of the debt can strengthening social cohesion during its mandate, both in reducing the basis for internal conflict and in diverting citizens research activities of internal annuity to the research activities of external annuity.
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