The bank-based financial systems of Germany and Japan were considered most conducive to growth in the 1980s. After the Japanese stagnation of the 1990s and the most recent slump in Germany, the conviction that the market-based Anglo-American financial systems are a prerequisite for a dynamic...

"Since the start of the high unemployment, there has been discussion in Germany of reductions in working hours, also for employment policy reasons, as a means of avoiding the threat of redundancies or - for lack of additional jobs - to spread the work available over more people to reduce...