The rise in unemployment is often blamed not only on the slowdown in economic growth but also on the increasing pressure to rationalise. Greater rationalisation should, however, have led to an increase in labour productivity, but this has not happened in the Federal Republic of Germany nor in a...

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...

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...