Die Vorstellung, die Wirtschaftspolitik könne auf die Globalisierung durch eine internationale Kooperation und Harmonisierung etwa der Sozialnormen antworten, ist ökonomisch nicht wohl begründet. Es ist eine Illusion, die Bedingungen für den Produktionsfaktor Arbeit weltweit harmonisieren zu...

The ongoing process of globalization, which is boosted by technological and political catalysts as well, increasingly raises public concerns. It is feared that international integration will be accompanied by national disintegration, since the income distribution in rich countries will become...

Europe’s labor is not competitiveness taking unemployment as the relevant indicator. The paper looks at other indicators such as job creation, productivity and unit labor costs and skills. It analyzes the reasons for the lack of competitiveness including a low degree of wage differentiation,...

Germany has had an extremely low growth performance since 1995. The paper looks at the long-run reasons for this loss of economic dynamics besides German unification: These include leaving labor idle, a declining share of investment in GDP, a weaker innovative activity, an ineffective system for...

This paper discusses the goal conflict between social protection and economic growth as well as employment. Taking the German economy as an example for the large continental economies of Old Europe, it analyzes twenty mechanisms that affect the fundamentals of the economy negatively and imply...

The paper analyzes why Germany experiences the high and sticky unemployment. It looks at wage policy and proposes a new approach to measure productivity growth when unemployment increases. It studies the position of trade unions and the institutional set-up of the labor market. It looks at the...

Locational competition is geographic competition, competition between places, between cities, between regions, and between countries. These spatial units compete with each other for the mobile production factors in factor markets, i.e., for mobile capital, for mobile technical know-how, and for...