Corsica: study which wants to demonstrate that autonomy makes you happier

Commissioned by autonomists in the Corsican Assembly, an investigation attempts to measure the effects of the autonomy of a territory on its economic, social and environmental performance.

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This is a document that intends to carry out its revolution of figures to become a weapon of mass communication for nationalists. A report establishing the effects of fiscal and political autonomy on economic performance, the social and environmental indicators of well-being, must be presented Thursday July 28 in session to the advisers of the island hemicycle.

These forty-five pages of a study commissioned by the presidency of the Corsican Assembly, carried out by the Cabinet Kyrn’economics, which Le Monde was able to consult, analyzes and compiles fifty-three university research in Eighty countries that have experienced decentralization within the European Union such as the Spanish, Italian regions and, beyond, in countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) or emerging.

This contribution comes when a cycle of discussions, between the Ministry of the Interior and Corsica, which can lead to an institutional development, has just opened, on July 21, five years after the Girondin Pact promised by Candidate Emmanuel Macron, in 2017, and four months after the riots linked to the deadly assault by Yvan Colonna in detention.

“By changing the focal length, we want to get out of the political posture which consists in waving the fetish of autonomy without economic and social content, to say that it does not fill the fridge”, assures Marie-Antoinette Maupertuis ( autonomist), the president of the Corsican Assembly who will present the text.

“Nourish the debates”

The lever of this study is first theoretical. “Development policies that are sensitive to the regional or specific local needs in terms of infrastructure and even human capital are likely to be more effective in promoting economic growth, than centralized policies that largely ignore these geographic differences”, indicates The report by quoting abundantly in an essay on fiscal federalism (1999), of the American economist Wallace E. Oates, theorist of optimal decentralization. Mr. Wallace says, among other things, that the management of public services is less expensive and produces effects on growth when it is not under the flood of central power but under the authority of local governments. Concretely, the creation in Spain of autonomous communities, which began in 1978, illustrates “a positive relationship between growth and decentralization”.

“It is not a question of borrowing what was done elsewhere, but of feeding the debate and then of adapting it, possibly”, specifies M me maupertuis. One of the claims of the nationalist majority is the advent of a derogatory tax status, a measure supposed to establish “automatic and full exercise autonomy”, wanted by Gilles Simeoni, the president of the Executive Council of Corsica.

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/Media reports.