Im Spätsommer 2022 ist die Weltwirtschaft im Abschwung. Anhaltend hohe Inflationsraten haben die US-Notenbank und viele weitere Zentralbanken veranlasst, mit einer Straffung ihrer Geldpolitik zu beginnen. Zudem ist seit dem Ausbruch des Ukraine-Kriegs Energie knapper und teurer geworden....

Der Ausblick auf die internationale Konjunktur 2023 ist verschattet: Die Energieversorgung Europas ist ungewiss, die Leitzinsen steigen weiter, der Pandemieausbruch in China führt zu Produktionsausfällen. Belastungen für die deutsche Wirtschaft kommen von hohen Energiepreisen und einem...

From its early post-war catch-up phase, Germany's formidable export engine has been its consistent driver of growth. But Germany has almost equally consistently run current account surpluses. Exports have powered the dynamic phases and helped emerge from stagnation. Volatile external demand, in...

Recent pre-crisis growth accounting exercises attribute strong productivity growth toincreased investments in information and communication technologies (ICT), especiallyduring the mid-1990s. EU-wide stylized facts about a growing US-EU productivity gapare confirmed for Germany, particularly...

US labor productivity in ICT-skill intensive industries experienced tremendousincreases in post-1995 trend growth compared to Germany, while other (non-ICT-skillintensive) industries showed similar growth trends in both countries. Examining thesource of industry productivity growth in German...

The question whether international openness causes higher domestic growth has been subject to intense discussions in the empirical growth literature. This paper addresses this issue using the fall of the Berlin wall in 1990 as a natural experiment. We analyze whether the slow-down in convergence...

It is obvious that the German economy exhibits a significant decline in economic growth during the last two decades. Although the German economy has still to overcome the burden of the reunification in 1990 it is shown that this burden might be only one reason of this decline. In this study we...

We evaluate explanations for why Germany grew so quickly in the 1950s. The recent literature has emphasized convergence, structural change and institutional shake-up while minimizing the importance of the postwar shock. We show that this shock and its consequences were more important than...

This paper explores the factors behind the time path of real spending and revenue in the West German states from 1975 to 2004. The empirical approach stresses robustness and takes into account a large set of economic and political variables. Our results suggest that common economic factors and,...