Booman has already kindly put up a plug for my story in this
diary, but I thought I would give you a preview myself: the Wall Street Journal is publishing an article I wrote about France in its Op-Ed pages.
The WSJ Opinion Page is here, and my article is available through this link (which requires a subscription), but I have crossposted it in full over at European Tribune. I encourage you to go and read it over there, but here's a sneak peek:
Can-Do France
France has problems, but none that makes it the sick man of Europe as one would conclude from reading both the French- and English-language press, and none that could not be solved within a few years by following policies that build on the strengths of the country -- its infrastructure, a well-educated and productive work force, a dynamic population that accounts for 60-80% of Europe's natural population growth, and efficient companies.
More nice stuff about France from the WSJ below...
The fact is that average French GDP growth per capita over the past 10 years (2%), has been very similar to that in the U.K. (2.3%) and the U.S. (2.1%). More interestingly, as pointed out in a March article by Denis Clerc in "Alternatives Economiques," France has actually enjoyed stronger job growth than the U.K. over that period (14% vs. 11%), and fewer of those jobs were created in the public sector -- 300,000, or 15%, of the new jobs in France are government jobs, versus 860,000, or 45%, in Britain.
(...)
Thus, the French economy looks weak compared to the U.K. only when using selective data -- notably by focusing on the last two years, which is the only period in the last 10 years when the U.K. economy really outperformed the French economy. One must also not neglect the fact that British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown has been on a Keynesian spending binge in recent years, underpinned by a housing boom, which has provided a lot of fuel to general consumption.
So when you hear people saying that the economies of "old Europe" are totally fucked up, you can now point them to the Wall Street Journal Op-Ed pages for some nuance...
As some of you may be aware as I've mentioned it in the past, I have already published 3 articles in the WSJ Op-Ed pages, all of them about Russia, a topic that I know pretty well. You can find them as follows:
Fix Gazprom's Fatal Leak (WSJ, May 31, 2002)
GAZPROM'S GOT WEST EUROPEANS OVER A BARREL (WSJ, November 8, 2002)
Moody's Sets Bear Trap for Western Investors (WSJ, October 13, 2003)
I am friendly with the editor of the WSJ European Op-Ed pages, whom I met in Ukraine in 1994, and while we disagree on a lot of things politically, we are able to speak about it civilly, and he found my point of view interesting enough for these pages.
So today, please, no cheap criticism of the WSJ, and let's simply celebrate the fact that they published a pretty good article (says I, wholly unbiased...) that will be read by a large number of people and advertises the European Tribune, which is a proud member of the reality-based blogosphere!
And hopefully, they will also come and read what's on the European Tribune, which you guys here at dKos have inspired me to build, and which has become a reality thanks to Booman and his own site, European Tribune's cousin, Booman Tribune.
Today on the European Tribune, you can also find my prognoses on the coming French presidential election, as well as our usual European Breakfast thread and Soj's EuroPDB for today.