Economic approaches.

Summary The term "economic approaches" is used to designate work that seeks to analyze public action using the concepts and methods developed by economics. The term should not, therefore, be confused with political economy as understood by much of political science, which generally takes the opposite approach-understanding "the economic" through "the political" (Hay and Smith, 2018). While state action has been at the heart of many debates and concerns in economics since its origins, the ways in which it is understood have varied considerably over time. Since the second half of the 20th century, two main axes have emerged. The first concerns the study of the justifications and effects of public intervention on economic activity. This very broad theme, which is also old, still occupies a central place in the discipline's agenda. A second line of research that has emerged more recently concerns the analysis of the design and implementation of public programs. Essentially developed in the wake of public choice and the Chicago School (of law and economics), it has long given rise to the production of works that maintain a strong mistrust of the virtue of state action, even if a certain complexity of this research can be observed over the recent period.