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The article focuses on the undertakings of the Research Institute of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Germany. The Institute was established by Friedrich Ebert in 1958 and its research is focused on social science, economic and socio-history in relation to the advancement of democratic thought and political movement. It primarily identifies the effects of technological advancement in Europe and Germany, specifically on worker's movements. The Institute has also undertaken studies on adult education, cooperatives, trade unions, and bibliographical work on social, economic and political movement of Asia and Africa. Its major project is the completion of "Friedrich Ebert and His Time" that describes the social, economic and political movement during Ebert's time.

The growth of the public sector in the post-war period and the consequences of this development for economic growth is a strongly disputed subject of economic theory and policy. In this paper the development trends of state activities in the case of the Federal Republic of Germany are presented. The structure of public expenditures as well as the tax structure are taken into consideration and possible impacts on real economic growth are analysed, The negative correlations between some kinds of public expenditures (or taxes) and the growth rate of real GNP should not be taken in proof of the growth-retarding effects which might ensue from increasing state activities. It seems to be more likely that state activities have induced shifts of resources from the formal into the informal economy. Politicians should be aware that some measures of economic policy conventionally proposed will strengthen the movement into the informal economy, thus intensifying the current problems within the public budgets as well as in the social security system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper gives a brief overview of long wave analyses by embedding them into a general growth model of the Schumpeterian kind. A theory is presented which rests on price distortions in product and factor markets, and on the observation that institutional sluggishness prevents a society from reacting quickly to such distortions. This it is argued, breeds cycles of the Kondratieff type, Empirical evidence to support this theory is presented for Germany and for Argentina. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the migratory movements from South European countries to North European countries, specially to the Federal Republic of Germany. It states that the Federal Republic of Germany and other North European countries have been the destination of all migration types because of their economic growth, stable politics, and developed social security systems. It also presents information on the migrants' skill profiles. It mentions the three main causes of the migratory movements, such as wars and persecution, ecological and economic burdens, and social structure changes.

This paper explores the emergence of direct linkages between the international economy and the state government of Baden-Württemberg, Germany. In the early 1990s Baden-Württemberg embarked on a plan in which the laender government took the lead in organizing a large-scale, high technology project for the development of interactive television. Creating a 'network' between itself and major economic actors the laender government sought to enhance the economic development of the region. However, as the economic actors involved in the project questioned the economic viability of interactive television, they began to withdraw from the project. The project's failure demonstrates the incompatibility of political objectives with the economic goals of actors in a globalized economy. We conclude that as attractive as the network approach may be for regional and national governments, it is likely to be successful only where both sets of actors see the outcome as enhancing their respective priorities (political legitimacy and economic gains). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assesses the economic status of several countries. Information on population and income stagnation of Japan and Korea; Cost and benefits of Korean unification; Issue on unemployment in Germany; Economic growth of China.

This article focuses on the struggle for a social Europe by examining social partnership developments in two western countries, Germany and Britain, and two eastern countries, Bulgaria and Poland. The resurgence of social partnership in the west, even in the weakest case (Britain), is paradoxically driven in part by neoliberal EU economic policies. In the east, post-communist tripartism helped preserve social peace with the coming of markets, while both international lending agencies and subsequent EU accession processes pushed domestic actors towards social dialogue. The coming or deepening of markets has therefore surprisingly promoted or reinforced relations of social partnership throughout Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article talks about the effects of the West German Pension Insurance Law of 1957 in the economic developments of Germany. The law has transformed that country's capital based government pension system designed to provide an income supplement into a pay-as-you-go system intended to provide an income replacement. The transformation did not harm economy in either the short or medium term. However, it weakened the finances of the pension system itself.

The Germans' conviction of being an international frontrunner in environmental policy stands in contrast to the unwillingness of the German national governments of the 1990s to undertake a commitment for a nationwide sustainable development strategy. Using five core strategy categories, namely horizontal and vertical integration, participation, implementation mechanism, monitoring and evaluation, this article provides an overview of the German sustainable development strategy preparation and implementation process. While the strategy is an ambitious concept, it also exhibits important shortcomings when viewed with different analytical perspectives such as policy, management and political strategy. Only with all of these perspectives combined can we arrive at specific conclusions about the assessment of the strategy process and make the essential characteristics of political strategy apparent. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas initially physical capital and later, knowledge capital were viewed as crucial for growth, more recently a very different factor, entrepreneurship capital, has emerged as a driving force of economic growth. In this paper, we define a region's capacity to create new firms start-ups as the region's entrepreneurship capital. We then investigate the local embeddedness of this variable and which variables have an impact on this variable. Using data for Germany, we find that knowledge-based entrepreneurship capital is driven by local levels of knowledge creation and the acceptance of new ideas, indicating that local knowledge flows play an important role. Low-tech entrepreneurship capital is rather increased by regional unemployment and driven by direct incentives such as subsidies. All three measures are locally clustered, indicating that indeed, entrepreneurship capital is a phenomenon that is driven by local culture, and is therefore locally bounded. Mientras que inicialmente el capital físico, y posteriormente el capital conocimiento, fue considerado crucial para el crecimiento, más recientemente un factor muy diferente, el capital empresarial de espíritu emprendedor ( entrepreneurship capital), ha surgido como una fuerza impulsora de crecimiento económico. En este artículo, definimos como capital empresarial emprendedor la capacidad de una región para originar la puesta en marcha de nuevas empresas. A continuación investigamos el arraigo local de esta variable y las variables que tienen un impacto sobre esta variable. Usando datos de Alemania, hallamos que el capital empresarial emprendedor basado en el conocimiento está motivado por niveles locales de creación de conocimiento y la aceptación de nuevas ideas, indicando que los flujos de conocimiento local juegan un papel importante. El capital empresarial emprendedor basado en bajas tecnologías aumenta con el desempleo regional y está motivado por incentivos directos como subsidios. Las tres variables están agrupadas localmente ( locally clustered), indicando que sin duda el capital empresarial emprendedor es un fenómeno motivado por la cultura local, y por tanto atribuible a una localidad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine the implication of a simple class of fiscal rules for long-run economic growth and welfare. The Golden Rule of Public Finance that we examine is motivated by institutional arrangements in countries such as Germany and the UK. We find that rules that seek to limit government borrowing to productive investment spending have a clear justification in terms of growth and welfare when government-provided goods are otherwise excessively provided. Even in the case where it is private consumption that is excessive, the Golden Rule of Public Finance is likely to be good from a growth perspective, but the welfare effects are more ambiguous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consumer research has extensively analysed psychological determinants of customer satisfaction. As macro-level customer satisfaction data were not available until recently, researchers have only taken first steps towards analysing economic determinants of customer satisfaction. Based on a more complex conceptual framework and on data from Germany and Japan, this article examines how economic processes influence the perceived value of goods and services, quality expectations and customer satisfaction. Using principal component analysis, regression analysis and structural equation modelling, this study finds that perceived value is positively influenced by both economic growth and lagged economic expectations. Customer satisfaction is positively influenced by economic growth and negatively by current economic expectations, with half of the impact mediated by perceived value. Economic expectations positively influence expectations regarding the quality of goods and services. These results imply that consumer researchers should no longer ignore economic influences on consumer attitudes. Marketing managers are advised to be cautious not to misinterpret economic-induced variations in customer satisfaction as caused by corporate performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 1990s, regional networks have received a lot of academic and political attention as vehicles for knowledge-based economic development. However, this powerful rhetoric has been accompanied by surprisingly little concrete analysis. Economic geography is only recently waking up to the potential of network analysis for interorganisational linkages within and between regions. We discuss network analysis as a strategic information tool for regional knowledge management and apply it to the metropolitan region of Hannover-Braunschweig-Göttingen-Wolfsburg in the northern German state of Lower Saxony. Producing network diagrams and parameters of network size, density, centrality, cohesion and connectivity from a large sample of actors and linkages, our survey shows striking differences between different fields of competence that highlight the potential of network analysis as a powerful tool and a necessary basis for decision-making to propel metropolitan regions into the knowledge economy. We outline both case-specific and generic implications for the practice of regional knowledge management. However, a few methodological shortcomings still call for further research to be conducted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY The observation that some immigrants choose not to integrate into the host society has caused political controversies across European states. This paper hypothesizes that immigrants can exploit social networks of different scales in order to substitute for costly integration. Using a novel dataset of Turkish households in Berlin, which was specifically collected for this analysis, we investigate the determinants of integration as well as the impact of integration and networks on households' economic success. We find evidence that integration promotes income even after accounting for potential endogeneity bias. Using endogenous switching regression model, we test whether local ethnic networks can be successfully used to generate household income. In line with the view that there is a trade-off between integration and the establishment of ethnic contacts, we find that local ethnic and familial networks increase the income of unintegrated migrants, while transnational networks decrease it. Moreover, education is more income improving for integrated than non-integrated immigrants and remaining closely integrated within their own ethnic group is more economically advantageous for poorer households. These results provide evidence that integration is the rational strategy for better-off immigrants while it may be too costly for poorer immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trade openness, popularly measured as ( X + M)/ GDP in the hundreds of studies published to date, consistently considers the world's biggest trading countries such as the USA, the UK, Japan and Germany to be closed economies, irrespective of the data set used. This study suggests a composite trade share measure that more completely reflects reality by combining two important dimensions of trade openness: trade share and the relative importance of a country's trade level to total world trade. Robustness tests support the new proposed measure in lieu of the conventional measure of openness and suggest that the latter may not only be incomplete but may also overstate the impact of trade on such things as income and the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the Lisbon Strategy and mandate, the European Commission committed itself to promoting entrepreneurship as a major driver of innovation, competitiveness, and growth. This paper demonstrates that the renaissance of entrepreneurship policy along with the implementation of the Lisbon Agenda resulted in the localization of policy-making, and re-strengthened policy-makers on the ground to successfully mobilize directly at the supranational level. Furthermore, it shows that EU entrepreneurship policy-making has contributed to a shift from hierarchical government to a more horizontal and interactive form of governance in the new German Laender which were highly exposed to Structural Funds and the Lisbon Agenda. The focus of analysis on the sub-national level helps to fill an academic void in Europeanization and governance literature. By integrating a region- and policy-specific perspective, this contribution goes beyond theorizing the regional dimension of Europeanization in a multi-level governance scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of International Development is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

After German reunification, interregional subsidies accounted for approximately 4% of gross fixed capital investment in the new federal states (i.e. those which were formerly part of the German Democratic Republic). We show that, between 1992 and 2005, infrastructure and corporate investment subsidies had a negative net impact on regional economic growth and convergence. This result is robust to both the specification of spatially weighted control variables and the use of instrumental variable techniques to control for the endogeneity of subsidies. Our results suggest that regional redistribution was ineffective, potentially due to a lack of spatial concentration to create growth poles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While earlier research has shown that regional restructuring after reunification has led to broad de-industrialization processes in eastern Germany's chemical industry, this article focuses on how re-bundling processes at the corporate level have stimulated adjustments to the changing economic and political environment leading to a renewed regional development trajectory. The analysis is based on a conceptualization that assesses diachronic processes of rupture and re-bundling by applying a bottom-up perspective of how corporate adjustments and restructuring processes generate re-bundling types that manifest themselves in broader regional re-bundling scenarios. The empirical analysis focuses on a qualitative case study of Bitterfeld- Wolfen, the eastern region with the largest chemical industry. The research provides evidence that, although new firm formation has remained weak and acquisitions of chemical multinationals have generated structures only tenuously embedded in the regional economy, modernization and re-bundling process have contributed to a renewed, smaller yet stable, regional chemical industry. The analysis further shows that the associated processes depended on the roles of individual industrial leaders in the region, who acted as network builders, mobilized joint action and stimulated the development of a collective regional spirit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we use a structural vector autoregressive model to study the effects of oil market developments on the German economy. We find that higher oil prices are always associated with a decline in private consumption expenditures, but the response of gross domestic product (GDP) crucially depends on the underlying shock. While a disruption in oil supply provokes a recession, positive world demand shocks prompt a temporary increase in exports and investment, which initially outweigh the cutback on consumption. In a counterfactual analysis, we show that the world demand shocks that led to the 2007/2008 oil price rise triggered a delayed 0.8 percent decrease in German GDP in 2009, and therefore notably contributed to the recession of that year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Low rates of internal migration in many European countries contribute to the persistence of significant regional labor market differences. I use the Mikrozensus, a large annual sample of households living in Germany, to further our understanding of the underlying reasons. This paper makes two main contributions: first, the paper quantifies the disutility of migrating. To this end, I estimate conditional logit models of the migration decision across the German federal states. Second, I then focus on the differences between immigrants and natives. I find significantly higher responsiveness to labor market differentials in the immigrant population than in the native population. Unobserved moving costs for immigrants are estimated to be only about 31 percent of this same cost for natives. The findings bear on the assessment of the economic impact of immigration, and the paper contributes to the current immigration-related policy debates that feature prominently in many European countries, and that likely will continue to be important in light of the ongoing EU expansion and the resulting east-west migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there were a lot of new studies about the phenomenon of internationalization in the past several years, the field of newly founded technology-based firms ( NTBFs) internationalization was less considered in literature. We contributed in filling this research gap using a longitudinal study to discover the determinants of internationalization in Germany. Our sample was based on 116 venture capital-financed NTBFs; 44 of them went international. Given the high dependence on exports of the German economy, the internationalization behavior of its NTBFs is of great importance for the future macroeconomic development of the country. In comparison, there are still very few empirical studies on the key determinants and initial drivers for the rapid internationalization of German start-ups. We showed that technological and financial factors are positively related to going global. The characteristics of the human capital, however, have no significance for going international in our sample. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What do the recent trends in German economic development convey about the trajectory of change? Has liberalization prepared the German economy to deal with new challenges? What effects will liberalization have on the co-ordinating capacities of economic institutions? This article argues that co-ordination and liberalization are two sides of the same coin in the process of corporate restructuring in the face of economic shocks. Firms seek labour co-operation in the face of tighter competitive pressures and exploit institutional advantages of co-ordination. However, tighter co-operation with core workers sharpened insider-outsider divisions and were built upon service sector cost cutting through liberalization. The combination of plant-level restructuring and social policy change forms a trajectory of institutional adjustment of forming complementary economic segments which work under different rules. The process is driven by producer coalitions of export-oriented firms and core workers' representatives, rather than by firms per se. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1920s, Germany was the world's largest capital importer, financing reparations through U.S. credits. We examine financial channels in crisis transmission between these two countries around the German financial crisis of 1931. We specify a structural dynamic factor model to identify financial and monetary factors separately for each of the two economies. We find substantial crisis transmission from Germany to the United States via the financial channel, while monetary or financial crisis transmission from the United States to Germany was weak. We also find major real effects of the 1931 crisis on both economies, again transmitted via the financial channel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Social Security Review is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Do new school types focusing on practical and business-related knowledge lead to increased economic performance? To analyse this question, this article examines the introduction of two types of modern secondary education, the Gewerbeschule and its successor, the Realschule, in nineteenth-century Bavaria. Since the opening of these schools is arguably endogenous-as it was mainly the large, prosperous cities that opened one-the estimated treatment effect capturing the economic influence of the Gewerbeschule/ Realschule will lead to biased results. To alleviate this bias, propensity score matching is adopted to compare relatively similar counties with and without these schools. Using historical county-level data on tax revenues, business formations, employment structure, and patent holdings, ordinary least squares regression analysis shows that the opening of a modern secondary school is in general positively associated with economic performance several years later. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the theoretical concept that a city is always influenced by the relations it has to its hinterland and to other cities. Taylor and colleagues point out that city-city relations and city-hinterland relations can be understood as two sides of a coin. Using this conception the polycentric structure and dynamics of the German urban system can be described through: (i) metropolitan functions representing city-hinterland relations (cosmopolitanity) and (ii) a network of cities representing city-city relations (connectivity). Measuring separately the degrees of cosmopolitanity and connectivity, we look at whether the German urban system after reunification has grown together, becoming one balanced urban system, and what role Berlin - as the new capital in the overall system - now has. The results of the two perspectives are compared and analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the importance of establishment size for the German/US labour-productivity gap in manufacturing at the start of the twentieth century. First, we show that the left tail of the employment distribution by establishment size was larger in Germany than in the USA. Second, using US state data for 1909, we find a positive correlation between establishment size and labour productivity. Third, imposing the coefficients of these estimates on establishment-size differences between Germany and the USA, we calculate that a redistribution of German employment to larger establishments, as in the USA, reduces the labour-productivity gap by about 25 per cent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses price information relating to 12 towns and wage information from 18 towns to develop a real wage index for unskilled urban labourers in Germany during the three-and-a-half centuries preceding the onset of rapid industrialization. Combining the new series with information from other parts of Europe establishes two stages of real wage divergence during the seventeenth to nineteenth century. The first occurred in the middle of the seventeenth century when real wages in centres of trade and finance located on the rim of the North Sea rose far above the level prevailing in their hinterland. The second stage unfolded from the second quarter of the eighteenth century when the real wage in south England, northern and central Italy, and Germany began to diverge; Germany followed a middle path between the other two countries. The second commercial revolution, which improved business techniques and promoted Smithian growth, goes a long way towards accounting for this development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Relocation of production to countries with low labour costs has induced increased labour market flexibility, which has been praised as a silver bullet for economic growth and low unemployment. Within a unionised oligopoly framework, in which a multinational firm has the option to relocate its production to a foreign country, we analyse the welfare implications of both centralised and flexible wage‐setting regimes. For very low foreign wages, wage flexibility leads to higher welfare than a rigid centralised regime. In contrast, for ‘intermediate’ wage levels in the foreign country, an industry‐wide uniform wage leads to higher social welfare than flexible wages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Welfare‐state transformation and entrepreneurial urban politics in Western welfare states since the late 1970s have yielded converging trends in the transformation of the dominant Fordist paradigm of social housing in terms of its societal function and institutional and spatial form. In this article I draw from a comparative case study on two cities in Germany to show that the resulting new paradigm is simultaneously shaped by the idiosyncrasies of the country's national housing regime and local housing policies. While German governments have successively limited the societal function of social housing as a legitimate instrument only for addressing exceptional housing crises, local policies on providing and organizing social housing within this framework display significant variation. However, planning and design principles dominating the spatial forms of social housing have been congruent. They may be interpreted as both an expression of the marginalization of social housing within the restructured welfare housing regime and a tool of its implementation according to the logics of entrepreneurial urban politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What characterizes regions where right‐wing populist parties are relatively successful? A prominent hypothesis proposed in the emerging "geography of discontent" literature claims that places that are "left behind" constitute a breeding ground for the rise of populism. We re‐examine this hypothesis by analyzing the rise of populism in Germany. Our results suggest that high vote shares of populist parties are associated with the long‐term decline of a region's relative welfare, which goes beyond a lifespan of people inhabiting such "left behind" places. Moreover, we are able to show that a place‐based collective memory about past prosperity plays a crucial role in shaping present resentment. Finally, we find the education level of the regional population to be an important channel through which the collective memory about the past translates into populism support today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]