After the fall of state socialism about two decades ago, democracy and market economies were assumed to diffuse worldwide. However, the American financial crisis of 2008, leading to a worldwide economic crisis caused increasing criticism of capitalism. As laissez-faire capitalism, Keynesianism...

Germany has experienced tremendous growth rates in the aftermath of World War II. Since the early 1970s, growth rates declined and settled down at a more or less constant rate of 2 percent per year, only to experience a renewed negative trend around the early 2000s. We investigate the evolution...