Germany's system of economic and political governance strongly relies on group decision-making and consensus to solve economic issues. This approach relates to a wide spectrum of decisions, including the social partners with the trade unions and the employers' associations in wage formation, the...

Germany remains Europe's largest and most diversified source of new technology, but still lags in the fastest growing areas of today's high technology. After World War II, West-German technology policy sought to rebuild the institutions which had supported Germany's leadership in the high-tech...

Germany's social security system is surveyed, its benefits and contributions are discussed. The expansion of this system in the last decades is described, its impact on employment and growth is studied and proposals for the reform of the system are discussed.

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...

Germany is the laggard of Europe, yet the country is world champion in merchandise exports. The paper tries to solve this theoretical and empirical puzzle by diagnosing a "pathological export boom" and a "bazaar effect". Excessively high wages defended by unions and the welfare state against the...

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...

In dem Beitrag werden zentrale Reformschritte bei der Reorganisation der Alterssicherung und des Gesundheitswesens diskutiert. Im Zentrum steht die Unterscheidung von großen und kleinen Risiken und die Rolle des Wettbewerbs bei der Reform der Krankenversicherung.

Germany has about the same proportion of foreigners in its population as the United States, it is an immigration country. In a way, Germany has let immigration happen, but it did not really have an explicit immigration policy in the past. Now it has to make up its mind on its immigration policy...