The German economy is recovering from the COVID-19 shock. With the successful containment of the coronavirus, output has quickly rebounded from its trough in April and has made up a good part of the losses within a few months. This strong momentum essentially reflects the normalization of...

Evsey Domar put forward in a couple of articles in the 1940s a "guaranteed income growth proposal." For the first time in macroeconomics, economic policy was supposed to work merely through the impact of its announcement on expectations. He claimed that optimistic expectations of income growth...

Traditionally, economic growth and business cycles have been treated independently. However, the dependence of GDP levels on its history of shocks, what economists refer to as 'hysteresis,' argues for unifying the analysis of growth and cycles. In this paper, we review the recent empirical and...

A standard model of activist macroeconomic policy derives a monetary reaction rule by assuming that governments have performance objectives, but are constrained by an augmented Phillips curve. In addition to monetary policy, governments apply a variety of instruments to influence inflation and...

The German economy is facing strong headwinds. In recent months, economic momentum has continued to slow down and companies are much more pessimistic about the future. The high level of global economic policy uncertainty likely was an important contributing factor. Gross domestic product (GDP)...

The German economy has shifted down a gear. After still very high economic momentum in Germany until the middle of last year, production stalled noticeably. Temporary stress factors such as the problems of automobile manufacturers with the new WLTP standard and the low water levels in the Rhine...

The economic upswing in Germany continues, although the expansion loses some steam. Compared to our summer forecast, we reduced our expectations for GDP growth by 0.1 and 0.3 percentage points in the current and next year, respectively, to 1.9 percent (2018) and 2.0 percent (2019). So for now,...

The upswing in Germany is starting to falter. In the third quarter, the economy shrank for the first time in three years. This decline was primarily due to special factors. In particular, problems with the new vehicle certification standard (WLTP) affected the automotive industry. In addition to...

The strong economic upswing in Germany has taken a break. For the current year, we revise our GDP growth forecast down by 0.5 percentage points to 2.0 percent. However, the slowdown in economic activity at the beginning of the year is mainly due to temporary factors. We therefore expect growth...