From the very beginning of the European Monetary Union the crucial institutions, the European Commission and the European Central Bank, led by mainstream economic thinking, were not up to their task of controlling the core of the system effectively. A huge gap in competitiveness among the member...

This article examines a sample of German pharmaceutical firms to highlight the strategic reasons why firms participate in various intellectual property (IP) marketplaces, both proprietary (patents and copyrights) and non-proprietary (open source and non-patented technology). The obstacles that...

This study calculates the impact of investment in broadband technology on German employment and economic output. Two sequential investment scenarios are analysed: the first one reflects the government's National Broadband Strategy that extends through 2014, and the second covers the...

The German federal government's fiscal consolidation package, announced in June, is designed to permanently reduce the federal deficit to a new target level. This article uses a three-region version of the European Commission's QUEST model to gauge the impact of the package on Germany and the...

With respect to the recently ratified economic stimulus package in Germany, it is fundamentally important to observe whether the expansion of physical infrastructure will further contribute to economic growth. This paper presents a way to address the problem of endogeneity using panel data on 16...

With banking sectors worldwide still suffering from the effects of the financial crisis, public discussion of plans to place toxic assets in one or more bad banks has gained steam in recent weeks. The following paper presents a plan how governments can effi ciently relieve ailing banks from...

This paper contributes to the discussion on the European current account imbalances by analysing the intra-European trends since 1990 based on the theory of optimum currency areas. The authors show that German unification was the origin of not only the 1992-93 EMS crisis but also rising...