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...

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...

The paper bases itself on recent theoretical writings in growth economics that empha-size the effects of both own R&D efforts and of interregional technology spillovers on regions´ productivity. We propose robust estimation techniques to evaluate the R&D spillovers across West German functional...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive concept for the role of culture in economic growth. Design/methodology/approach – The paper overviews the culture based development (CBD) concept and its precise definition of culture as an encompassing socio-economic factor....

This paper argues that the role of universal banks in German industrialization has been over-emphasized. The contribution of universal banks to the financing of railway investment was overshadowed by that of the German states. The distinctive features of the relationship between universal banks...

We study an overlapping generations model of human capital accumulation with threshold effects using regional data for West Germany. Our basic goal is to shed light on what makes German regions grow. The paper finds that the relative income distribution appears to be stratifying into a trimodal...

Climate change is one of the most important issues of the next decades and has the potential to severely impact societies, economies and human wellbeing.

Purpose – The aim of the paper is to assess the determinants and impact of employer sponsored further training on wage growth in West Germany over the period 1992 to 2002. Design/methodology/approach – Following a descriptive narrative on further training and wages in Germany, data derived...

Purpose – Sociologists are discussing whether or not economic growth enhances subjective well‐being. To complement their research from a housing perspective, the purpose of this paper is to investigate whether aggregate income enhances dwelling satisfaction over time. While cross‐sectional...