Zukünftige Ausstrahlung der Biotechnologie auf die Beschäftigung in Deutschland

The paper quantitatively analyses the effects of modern biotechnology on the number of employees and the employment structure in Germany. Based on the year 2000 the development of the employment in differing application fields of biotechnology until 2010 is simulated in three scenarios. Almost 240,000 employees (around 0.7 of all employees in Germany) were directly or indirectly (in different application fields like food processing, pharmaceuticals, fine chemistry or environmental biotechnology) influenced by modern biotechnology in the year 2000. In addition, there are almost 380,000 jobs linked to these employees in the input industries (representing around 1% of all employees in Germany). According to the results of the computational simulations a maximum of up to 1.7 million employees can be influenced by modern biotechnology in Germany in 2010 assuming a very fast penetration of this technology. Finally the authors discuss the implications of the analysed issues and derive further recommendations for economy, politics and science.