The Political Economy of Germany in the Twentieth Century
... Data from the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) appear that Germany's GDP rose by just 0.6% in 2022-a distant cry from the 2.5% average development seen over the Eurozone. In expansion, Germany's potential development rate has decreased to just 0.7%, agreeing to a later evaluation by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), raising questions approximately the country's long-term economic prospects (Hardach, 2022). Russia's invasion of Ukraine caused the show energy emergency, which has made Germany's economic issues more regrettable. ...
... To reduce the impacts of the epidemic, the German government presented a number of budgetary measures and policy activities, counting as expanded unemployment compensation, money related help for enterprises, and changes in open health framework. Indeed, if these activities have reduced the economic affect, there's still reason for concern over the pandemic's long-term impacts, which incorporate the mounting open obligation and the plausibility of long-lasting changes in customer behavior (Hardach, 2022). The issues confronting the German economy have been made more awful by the situation in Ukraine. ...
... The narrative revolves around the transformative impact of labor advertise changes, especially the Hartz changes, which pointed to diminish unemployment and improve labor market adaptability. Germany's unemployment rate diminished significantly as a result, from 10.5% in 2005 to 3.4% in 2022, illustrating the viability of these policy changes (Hardach, 2022). Germany's diligent commitment to export-oriented advancement is crucial to the country's economic account. ...
This study delves into the complex web of causes that have contributed to Germany's gradual decline as a sought-after business location. This scholarly work methodically examines a variety of internal and external variables shaping the country's economic environment, thus providing a comprehensive picture of the significant challenges currently faced by the German economy. The study methodically analyzes key variables such as labor market dynamics, regulatory frameworks, demographic changes and infrastructure improvements to uncover the root causes of this decline. The results of this research are of enormous importance for the formulation of strategic, precise policy initiatives aimed at revitalizing the German economy, strengthening its resilience and restoring its position as a global beacon for industry recruitment and retention. Using a strong mixed methods approach, this study leverage the synergy of primary data collected through surveys, interviews and case studies, and secondary data derived from government reports, academic publications and economic indicators. This multi-layered technology makes it easier to recognize observable patterns and develop concrete, realistic plans that will lead Germany to long-term economic development and prosperity. This research is a component of efforts to revitalize Germany's economic strength and restore its reputation as a leading commercial center, and provides useful information for policymakers, industry executives and academics alike. The comprehensive analysis presented in this study has far-reaching implications for the larger European economic environment and contributes to the global discourse on sustainable economic development and renewal.
... By 1929, 91% of the coal in Germany was cut mechanically. 22 The Index of industrial production in Germany for 1932 in comparison with 1928 (index 100) was: capital goods 45.7% and consumer 78.1%. 23 According to H. J. Braun and D. S. Landes, during the world economic crisis, the industrial production in Germany declined by 42% and in 1932 amounted to only 73% of the 1913-figure. ...
The article deals with the Great Economic Depression of 1929−1933. The research problem is the depression's negative consequences on the economy of the German Weimar Republic. The aim of the article is to present the main causes and consequences of the global economic and financial crises known as the Great Economic Depression and to investigate how this depression influences the economy and finance of the newly democratic postwar German state called as the Weimar Republic. The particular importance of this research subject is the fact that among all European states at the time it was exactly the Weimar Republic to be mostly affected by the global crises with terrible consequences on social and political life which finally brought Adolf Hitler and his NSDAP to the power in Germany. From the methodological point of view we used a relevant scientific literature followed by the historical sourses. We found that a global Great Economic Depression had mostly nagative economic, social and political influences to the German Weimar Republic which finally became on January 30 th , 1933 a prison of Hitler's NSDAP party in order to seek its salvation.
... There is broad consensus on this issue both internationally (see e.g. Marsh, 1998, Ferguson, 1998) and east of the Rhine (Hardach, 1980; Holtfrerich, 1986; Ritschl, 1996). However, while France's and Britain's debts were largely denominated in domestic currency, Germany's reparation burden was owed in foreign currency and to foreign claimants, giving rise to Original Sin (Eichengreen and Hausman, 1999 ). ...
Germany's Great Depression of the early 1930s started in 1929 with a sudden stop in the current account. It ended after a foreign debt default that unfolded in several stages from 1931 to 1933. This chapter reviews Germany's macroeconomic history between the gold-based stabilisation of 1924 and the transition to autarky and domestic credit expansion in 1933. During the Dawes Plan of 1924-29, German borrowed abroad massively to pay reparations out of credit, a phenomenon that gave rise to the debate about the transfer problem between Keynes and his critics. An incentive based interpretation of the transfer problem is sketched to explain the later current account reversal. Time-varying VARs are employed to trace the propagation of the resulting macroeconomic shock, and to obtain estimates of fiscal multipliers.
... However, discus^ons of German banking in the interwar period invariably concentrate on the macroeconomic aspects of the hyperinflation, the stabilization of the mark and the 1931 crash, without emphasizing the issue of linkages between industry and finance. (Hardach, 1980;James, 1986;Stolper, 1967). ...
Using data on physical output per worker for twenty-three industries, it is shown that contrary to popular belief, German industry had not forged ahead of Britain by the 1930s. The pattern of Britain's comparative advantage is reflected in the fact that, although German productivity was substantially higher in heavy industry, British productivity was above German levels in light industry. Relative plant size is shown to be the most important approximate determinant of German/U.K. productivity levels. It is argued that cartelization was important in explaining the failure of Britain and Germany to close the productivity gap with the United States. Copyright 1990 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
The thesis examines the divergent economic trajectories of Italy and Germany
in the post-WWII period, focusing on public service investments. While both countries
initially followed similar growth patterns, they eventually diverged, particularly from
the early 1960s on. The main question is: why did the two countries diverge?
After providing the full historical context, the Solow-Swan model of economic
growth is employed and integrated by a System Dynamics model to analyse the role
of debt and its impact on productivity. The thesis suggests that in the short run,
countries that borrow more may appear more productive than they really are, but in
the long run, this is reversed. Countries that borrow less can allocate more resources
towards public services or productive investment, leading to higher productivity rates.
By using public employment in a reckless way and by failing at serious economic
planning/harmonisation, the Italian public debt exploded starting in the 1960s: this
ultimately blocked its development path. Then, the thesis discusses the “varieties of
capitalism” framework and how Italy and Germany can be categorised within it. Such
an attempt will entail looking at scholarly schemes of the past but in light of the new
findings.
This welfare state analysis and comparison will conclude the descriptive
section of the master’s thesis. In the normative section, I turn to a close examination
of the concepts of social justice and societal welfare through the lens of John Rawls’
theory of justice. The analysis prompts the question of the feasibility and desirability
of alternative welfare models and their adherence to an interesting yet abstract ideal of social justice, inviting the readers to look also at the descriptive findings of this work critically.
O propósito do presente trabalho é estudar políticas estrangeiras que posteriormente foram adotadas por intelectuais brasileiros, a fim de pensar um país em desenvolvimento. Nesse trabalho exploro o chamado ordoliberalismo – uma teoria alemã criada no pós-guerra, com o objetivo de alavancar o país destruído pela guerra, sem recorrer aos modelos main stream da época – keynesianismo, capitalismo, socialismo
This article is concerned with the genesis of German financial liberalisation. A refined inventory of financial system change – including new meso-level data on finance pattern and the marketisation of banking – reveals a varied pattern of change across German finance. It is argued that this financial diversification can only be understood with careful reference to the underlying ideational factors. An analytical narrative traces how technocratic ideas of financial modernisation during the 1980s began to open up space for the political program of finance capitalism to absorb liberal and leftist discontents with insider control and bank dominance. Upon reaching a tipping point of discursive dominance, the program was distinctly adopted across the political economy as the result of compartmentally different political, ideational and structural factors; creating a non-hegemonic financial paradigm that became identifiable in the face of recent crises. By developing analytical steps that link incremental and dynamic theories of institutional change in a conceptual framework of belief shifts, the paper contributes to efforts of adapting existing models of change to complex domains and accounting for the dynamic nature of the paradigm-generating process. The findings inform the larger debate about internal capitalist diversity and the coherence of national economic models.
Die Arbeitslosenquote in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland verläuft bekanntlich entlang einer U-Kurve. Zu Beginn der 50er Jahre ist sie sehr hoch. Sie hegt bei rund zehn Prozent1. In den fünfziger Jahren nimmt sie stetig ab. Spätestens 1960 erreicht sie die Vollbeschäftigung, sofern man hierunter eine Arbeitslosenquote von weniger als zwei Prozent versteht. Bis 1966/67 herrscht Vollbeschäftigung. Dann kommt die erste Rezession in der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik. Die Arbeitslosenquote wird hierdurch auf über zwei Prozent gehoben. Anschließend sinkt sie wieder auf das Vollbeschäftigungsniveau. Mit dem Ölpreisschock von 1973 beginnt eine neue Ära. Die wirtschaftliche “Trendwende”2 erfaßt die Bundesrepublik Deutschland mit voller Wucht. Die Arbeitslosenquote beginnt zu steigen und verharrt bis Ende der siebziger Jahre auf mittelhohem Niveau. Ende der siebziger und Anfang der achtziger Jahre klettert sie bis zu dem Plateau, das zu Beginn der fünfziger Jahre Ausgangspunkt für ihre Talfahrt war (vgl. Schaubild 1).
This article accepts that neo-institutionalist analysis is an important development in providing a framework for understanding the social organisation of economic activity within firms. However, it is argued that neo-institutionalism ignores political economy and an important institution – the market – within capitalist political economy such that the framework of analysis so far offered is inadequate. It is suggested that an understanding of that organisation would benefit from an incorporation of labour process analysis as the latter is explicit in arguing that the social organisation of economic activity cannot be decoupled from political economy and, hence with regard to capitalism, the effects of the market. For the sake of simplicity, the introduction maps out the general argument and subsequent sections of the article offer outlines and then evaluations of both forms of analysis separately before prosecuting a synthesis of the two.
‘For me it is a necessity to share with you what I think and feel, because I know you completely understand me, which is not something which I can take for granted in my environment here’, wrote First Lieutenant Heinz R. to his wife Ursula from Russia two years after his call-up in September 1939. Vouching for the fact that their connection to each other was just as strong in spite of the long separation, he continued ‘You yourself will have noticed, that when I have experienced something in particular or something has depressed me, I always send you a really long letter. It is the same for me as it is for you — I have to come to you with anything that deeply affects me.’1 Yet not all partnerships were as resilient. The circumstances presented by war often made it difficult for couples to stay in love: husbands and wives were ripped apart by the call-up of men, had dramatically different experiences of the war, and often possessed limited means to communicate these to one another.2 Overall then, how well did marital relationships fare in light of these challenging conditions?
Looking at campaign posters on the eve of the European elections in 1994, the viewer could almost believe the voters had hung their psyches out to dry. ‘Jobs, jobs, jobs,’ was one popular motif. Gangbusting, featuring shackled hands behind a pinstriped jacket, was another. But security, spelled out in red letters, was the clear favorite of both major parties. In the Christian Democratic version, a grandparent and grandchild were seen from the rear, hand in hand, bathed in autumnal light, with the parent generation conspicuously missing. In the Social Democratic variation, a young father, himself a disappearing species, was snoozing in a rowboat, with his young son, no common species either, snoozing on his chest. Tied securely to the pier, the boat was going nowhere.
The United States and the Soviet Union operated under the premise of a ‘grand design’ which would give the nascent post-war international order its ultimate structuring force. However, as it will be explored further in this chapter, the conflictual elements involved in the superpower interaction over the German Question also had a socially constructed dimension. A constructivist perspective on the conflictual elements between the superpowers arising out of the interaction regarding the treatment of the German Question adds to the understanding of the origins of the Cold War by providing space for the role of human agency in the process of polarisation and explaining the circumstances in which this process took place.
Over the course of the development of the European Union (EU), 1 there have been many attempts to formulate a common energy policy but with only limited success. The main reason for its failure has been the reluctance of member states to pool sovereignty in this highly sensitive policy area. Yet one might expect that a combination of factors would pull member states’ energy policies in the same direction: the increasingly integrated European economy, the common challenges of the environment and international competition, even the increased activism of the Commission in areas which impinge upon the energy sector should be bringing about a convergence of national energy policies, creating the basis for a truly European energy policy. That this book focuses upon national energy policies might suggest that such convergence is not yet a reality. However, it is clear that the factors noted above have had an effect upon member states and that arguably that impact is becoming more significant. In this introductory chapter we summarise some of the developments at work in the countries examined in the book - France, Germany, Italy and the UK - as well as elsewhere in the EU, assessing the current balance between diversity and convergence. We review the development of European energy policy and consider its significance for national energy policies.
Characterizing the processual orderliness of economic structures is a strong tradition of German economic discourse (Tribe 1995 pp. 1–8). The oldest contributions came from the cameralist sciences which, by defining the role of the state established a link between welfare objectives, the social as well as the legal order, and consensus. Friedrich List, for his part, defines a national and historical system of the economy that is opposed to the “cosmopolitan” view of British paleo-liberalism. For List, the structure of an economy can only be understood with reference to the political interests of nations which themselves depend on the stage of economic development reached. Subsequently, the German Historical schools developed appropriate tools for analysing economic structures and evolution. By introducing a revised method of analysis that leads to the definition of the concept of economic order, the Freiburg school finally emerged as the contemporary synthesis of the ideas relating to this issue.
The inspiration for this paper occurred in 1994, when I was deep in the archives of the city of Reußstadt, following events in the former German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik/GDR) --from the first public demonstrations of the late summer of 1989 to the opening of the Berlin wall on november 9th of same year --the beginning of the Wende1 that was to result in a reunified Germany on October. As I was reading through the city council minutes for early 1989, I stumbled on quite a surprise: There was a 'script' issued three to five days prior to each council meeting, one that listed speakers, their speeches, and voting results of elections yet to be held. I hadn't realized how completely the regional and national Social Unity Party officials (Sozialeinheitspartei, hereafter SED) had controlled local politics, a control that allowed no input, whatsoever, that deviated from the current political line. From that point on, I began to view council minutes as a script capturing local political history from which the evolution of power relationships could be evaluated, especially in Reußstadt, that was undergoing such drastic change. This report will trace the development of power relations in Reußstadt, using minutes from council meetings --intentionally scripted in the beginning --as the primary data. Patterns revealed in these meetings will form the basis of my discussion of shifting local hegemonic forces. For brevity, I will not discuss the definitional complexities or the usefulness of the concept of hegemony (Scott 1985; Roseberry 1989), but will follow William roseberry's recent (1996) formulation of its nature, which is "not . . . a finished and monolithic ideological formation but . . . a problematic, contexted, political process (emphasis in the original) of domination and struggle" (77).
Resumen La reconstrucción económica llevada a cabo después de la primera y segunda guerra mundial en los países excombatientes, fueron dos acon-tecimientos en los que las empresas jugaron el papel central por encima de la intervención estatal. Las recuperaciones económicas ocurrieron pa-ralelas a un inédito aumento de salarios con reducción en la jornada de trabajo; ello contradijo el sentido común y a la mayoría de los postula-dos económicos de ese momento y de ahora, pues pese a la difícil situa-ción provocada por la guerra, a fin de estimular la inversión no se apli-caron las tradicionales recetas de disminuir el salario y aumentar la jornada de trabajo, sino todo lo contrario, se pagó mucho más a los trabajadores por menos trabajo, lo cual provocó un acelerado aumento en el crecimiento, el cambio técnico y la inversión. Introducción El objetivo de este artículo es analizar la estrategia seguida por las empresas privadas al lograr la rápida reconstrucción económica al final de cada una de las dos guerras mundiales. Hasta ahora no se ha discutido suficientemente las causas por las cuales inmediatamente después de cada guerra mundial se alcanzaron tasas de elevado crecimiento y generación de empleos seguidas poco después de estabilidad de precios. A partir de dicho auge económico los países ricos iniciaron un acelerado crecimiento industrial que los diferenció por completo del resto del mundo.
This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that US power and preferences following World War II led to bilateralism in
Asia and multilateralism in Western Europe. It argues that the challenges facing the United States in both regions were similar,
as were US policies meant to address them. With some lag, the United States supported the economic recovery of the regional
powers it had defeated (Germany and Japan), saw the restoration of regional trade as a prerequisite, sought military bases
to assure postwar security, and envisioned rearming its former foes as part of its security strategy. The outcomes in the
two regions reflected the preferences and reservations of regional actors. The critical differences between the regions were
structural. The existence of middle powers was critical in Europe, the return of colonial powers to Asia precluded regional
arrangements in the short term, and geostrategic differences shaped the requisites for regional security.
Recent years have seen the so-called New Left school of historiography cut a wide swath through the study of American diplomacy. Reacting at least in part to the exigencies of the Vietnam War, as well as to older schools of diplomatic history, its adherents have molded a point of view that has emphasized economic factors as the driving force in American foreign policy. In this essay. Dr. Braeman focuses on the 1920s, a crucial decade in New Left thinking. After probing the intellectual origins of this school of thought, he brings historical statistics to bear in his analysis of American investment abroad, the conduct of American policymakers, and the contending interpretations of American foreign policy.
This article questions existing performing arts market segmentation practices in the United States, probing for examples of unintended exclusion and discrimination. The author critiques specific performing arts marketing scholarship and the segmentation practices that stem from it. Future growth of the performing arts industry's audiences may rest on the ability to define their composition more broadly, to be more inclusive rather than exclusive. At the same time, marketing theory, research, and practice may need to be specifically developed to meet the needs of both the performing arts industries and their audiences.
This time last year we published in the Review an article comparing macroeconomic policy in Britain and France. That article and the present one are both based on a three-year project in which we compare events and policies in Britain with those in the other major European countries.
Innovation was and still is the catalyst of the market-oriented economy. More than seventy years ago, it was Joseph A. Schumpeter who made innovation the centerpiece of a developing economy. Schumpeter's innovations took six specific forms: producing new commodities, organizing technological change in the production of commodities already in existence, opening up of new markets, discovering new sources of raw materials, standardizing work and improving handling of materials, and setting up new management organization, i.e., breaking up an existing monopoly or setting up a new one. Schumpeter's innovators produced socially useful goods. By carrying out all of these innovations, singly or in combination, the innovator earns much more than the normal profits, although this high profit is not permanent.If, however, market forces become suspended and direct controls take over, conditions of repressed inflation prevail. In such conditions, people have money in the pockets but no coupons to buy real goods. In such spending-happy conditions, another type of innovator made his appearance in occupied West Germany between 1945 and 1948 and in Israel between 1949 and 1951, producing low-utility or marginally useful items. In occupied West Germany, for example, there was a veritable flood of such “new” commodities — ashtrays, fancy lamps, dolls, chandeliers, wall and ceiling decorations - which had not been produced before World War II because of the low utility of such items. The German and Israeli “pseudoinnovators” circumvented the existing price regulations and made a lot of money in the process. Schumpeter, for some reason, overlooked this pseudoinnovator operating in conditions of repressed inflation. He may have been a captive of the idea that repressed inflation in a capitalist economy would inevitably lead to the euthanasia of the entrepreneur.
At the end of 1978, the German art critic Walter Frentz, introducing a film and public lecture in the city of Worms, postulated that Europeans could breathe new life into the idea of European unity by devoting greater care and attention to the shape and form of European cities. The theme of his remarks that night specifically encouraged the preservation of historic urban cores, but more striking was his general concept linking the development of the European Community with the treatment of the European city. As a growing literature on architectural symbolism and urban imagery suggests, cities take the shapes that are expressions of a total society, reflecting the spectrum of their political, economic and cultural life. As Europeans rebuilt and developed their cities in the period after World War II, they also charted the course of their unification.
Merger control is used in this article to illustrate the exercise of discretion in economic regulation. It suggests that discretion is unavoidable and examines the various modes of discretion exercised by institutions such as the Bundeskartellamt and Directorate‐General IV of the European Union. It argues that institutions should be structured to deploy discretion productively and to modify both legal and economic modes of analysis. Four elements in the article can be stressed. First, it provides an analysis of the important and under‐emphasized area of German merger control; secondly, it offers a comparative critique of the operation of German policy; thirdly, it suggests that an impoverished European theory of regulation could benefit from a transfusion of American concepts and, fourthly, it provides a sceptical perspective on current proposals for reform of EC competition policy institutions.
Because events occur too fast and ideas mature too slowly for responses to be designed anew for each pressing problem, policy innovation often relies on pre-existing models, foreign or domestic. This seems to be especially true for regulatory policymaking, since public regulation is typically introduced in conditions of crisis. In this paper we examine several cases of policy innovation in the area of economic and social regulation where the influence of foreign models is quite clear: the development of competition policy in Europe in the 1950s, the growth of European Community regulation, and the impact of the American deregulation movement on the telecommunications policies of different European countries. The analysis shows that while utilization of preexisting models is a common feature of policy innovation, such models are not literally translated into current policy. More or less extensive adaptations to a particular political, institutional and economic context are usually required. We also identify two distinct ways – push or pull – in which foreign models can affect domestic policy.
Nationalization was particularly important in the early 1930s in Germany. The state took over a large industrial concern, large commercial banks, and other minor firms. In the mid-1930s, the Nazi regime transferred public ownership to the private sector. In doing so, they went against the mainstream trends in western capitalistic countries, none of which systematically reprivatized firms during the 1930s. Privatization was used as a political tool to enhance support for the government and for the Nazi Party. In addition, growing financial restrictions because of the cost of the rearmament programme provided additional motivations for privatization.
Since 1990, the German government has been demanding from the civil servants of the former East Germany a new adaptability and creativity that was never promoted in the GDR bureaucracy. The article analyses the change of ethics in the former East Germany after 1990. It looks at the development of the German civil service, discusses the economic disparity between East and West, and examines the ethical tradition in the former socialist country. It uses the case of the selection in 2001 of the city of Leipzig by BMW as the location of a new manufacturing plant as an illustration of the new goal-oriented activities of the present Eastern bureaucracy. More than 250 European cities were competing for the new plant, which will create over 10,000 jobs. The level of performance of the Leipzig bureaucracy in the BMW case reveals the new efficiency and professionalism of the former Eastern civil service. In addition to Leipzig, virtually all the local and state administrations from the former East Germany have developed a sense of the necessities of the time, including globalization. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
This paper argues that economic planning under Stalin and Hitler in the 1930s was essentially similar, both in process and in outcome. Both economies had fixed prices and used coercion as part of a rather chaotic process of resource allocation. Consumption in both countries was sacrificed to investment in heavy industry. Both economies can be thought of as socialist, and socialism in the 1930s was hardly more than military mobilization.
The sustained unemployment in the United States during the recovery from the Great Depression has proved difficult to explain, as has the rapid elimination of unemployment in Germany. I argue that employment in the United States was restricted by high wages, which government policy raised above the level of efficiency wages. Socialist control and military expansion by the Nazis reduced unemployment, but also held down consumption.
The Great Depression spurred State ownership in Western capitalist countries. Germany was no exception, the last governments of the Weimar Republic took over firms in diverse sectors. Later, the Nazi regime transferred public ownership and public services to the private sector. In doing so, they went against the mainstream trends in the Western capitalist countries, none of which systematically reprivatized firms during the 1930s. Privatization in Nazi Germany was also unique in transferring to private hands the delivery of public services previously provided by government. The firms and the services transferred to private ownership belonged to diverse sectors. Privatization was part of an intentional policy with multiple objectives and was not ideologically driven. As in many recent privatizations, particularly within the European Union, strong financial restrictions were a central motivation. In addition, privatization was used as a political tool to enhance support for the government and for the Nazi Party.
One of the most important recent contributions to the field of comparative political economy is Mancur Olson's The Rise and Decline of Nations. In that work, Olson deduces, from his logic of collective action, a series of implications regarding the impact of social organizations distributional coalitions on economic growth that can explain variations in national growth rates across a wide range of time and space. This article considers the assumptions upon which that logic is founded, the plausibility of the several implications drawn from that logic, and the application of the theory to account for differences among five nations in rates of economic growth in the post-World War II era. The analysis suggests that the characteristics of group activity emphasized by Olson represent, at best, only a small part of the explanation of cross-national differences in growth. Instead, it suggests that an important source of the variation among nations in growth rates is the international political and economic system. In particular, the discussion of the German, Japanese, and British cases suggests that stagnation (or growth) is, to a considerable extent, the product of a nation's position in the world economy, the policy responses through which governments seek to perpetuate or improve that position, and the constraints upon (or opportunities for) growth-oriented domestic economic policy posed by that position.
The primary objective of this thesis is to demonstrate the direct relationship between history and literature, with particular reference to literature published in the German Democratic Republic. It explores the period of history from 1945 to 1990 describing the collapse of National Socialist Germany after World War Two; the formation of the Federal Republic of Germany in the West and the German Democratic Republic in the East in 1949; the historical, political and cultural evolution of East Germany until the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, and finally the absorption of the German Democratic Republic into the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990.
Focusing on the literary aspects of the German Democratic Republic’s cultural progression within this established historical framework, this thesis examines the distinctive evolution - in form and content - of literature produced in the German Democratic Republic taking direction from the model of ‘literary phases’ in the history of East German literature provided by Wolfgang Emmerich. By analysing eight selected texts from the body of literature of two of the German Democratic Republic’s most prominent authors, Jurek Becker and Christa Wolf, this thesis illustrates the influence of political and historical events on fictional texts written in and about East Germany.
Extrapolating from historiographer Hayden White’s theory which infers the irrefutable influence of literary conventions and developments on historical discourse, this thesis espouses an inverse corollary: that literary texts are necessarily influenced by historical developments. Thus, to a significant degree, an image of the evolution of the German Democratic Republic can be formed through a detailed reading of the literature - produced within this historical context, examples of which are provided by the analysis of selected texts of Jurek Becker and Christa Wolf.
[From the Introduction]. A Single Market? It has often been argued that variations in market regulation in the member countries of the EU continue to be formidable obstacles to European financial market integration (Lamfalussy, 2000). The question has subsequently been raised whether differences in market regulation are being upheld in order to protect domestic companies from foreign competitors. This paper asks why national approaches to sectoral regulation differ in the first place. If one is to believe the economic literature on sectoral regulation, public intervention is only justified in cases of market failures (Kay and Vickers, 1990). So, why do we see different approaches to market regulation?
Policy concertation (defined as making policy by means of agreements struck between government officials and representatives of employer associations and trade unions) is a major policy style in Western Europe. This article seeks to explain the political dynamics of policy concertation in terms of the varying configurations of three variables: perceived problems, the degree of shared economic understanding among the participants and the perceived implementation capacity of the participants. It is found that the incidence of broad policy concertation over the twentieth century in nine West European countries can be explained almost completely in terms of this configurational theory.
This report examines the process of economic and financial integration in East Asia in the light of Europe's experience.� The report provides a comprehensive analysis of East Asian monetary and financial integration process (including a deep analysis of East Asia's response to the 1997-98 financial crisis), a comprehensive critical survey of the literature on monetary and financial integration in East Asia, and an assessment of the various initiatives undertaken in the region for financial cooperation and macroeconomic surveillance.� Its aim is to evaluate the evolution of the last decade and to offer policy suggestions.� The main policy recommendations concern essentially two areas: (i) how to promote the creation of a regional financial market in Asia and (ii) how to encourage cooperation and macroeconomic surveillance in the region. (Provisional version. The printed publication will be delayed until the final text is available).
The Great Depression spurred State ownership in Western capitalist countries. Germany was no exception; the last governments of the Weimar Republic took over firms in diverse sectors. Later, the Nazi regime transferred public ownership and public services to the private sector. In doing so, they went against the mainstream trends in the Western capitalist countries, none of which systematically reprivatized firms during the 1930s. Privatization in Nazi Germany was also unique in transferring to private hands the delivery f public services previously provided by government. The firms and the services transferred to private ownership belonged to diverse sectors. Privatization was part of an intentional policy with multiple objectives and was not ideologically driven. As in many recent privatizations, particularly within the European Union, strong financial restrictions were a central motivation. In addition, privatization was used as a political tool to enhance support for the government and for the Nazi Party.
The real fluctuations of the German macroeconomy in the early 1920s differed markedly from those of the other major industrial economies. As the others began a steep depression in 1920, German prices stabilized and the economy grew, led by increased investment in response to the stabilization of the political climate. German income growth increased its trade deficits for about a year and cushioned the onset of the depression abroad. In summer 1921, however, as Germany began paying reparations, inflation restarted and investor confidence ebbed. The German boom strengthened then because exports increased and filled the gap left by lagging investment. As Germany struggled to pay reparations, her export boom worsened the depression of demand in the Allied economies, struggling then to recover from the depression.
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