Economist Survey Germany - 500 Beiträge pro Seite

[Scarlett]

Da doch Interesse zu bestehen scheint, einige Artikel aus dem Survey.

Übrigens: The Economist ist nicht mehr nur eine reine Wirtschaftszeitschrift, sondern ein allgemeines Nachrichtenmagazin mit einem besonderen Schwerpunkt Business und Finance. Nach meiner Beurteilung, und ich lese es seit Jahren, ist es weit besser als Spiegel, Focus, Time oder Newsweek.

Der erste Aufsatz steht im Thread Deutschland, der schwache Riese.
Hier gehts weiter:

The perils of pragmatism

Dec 5th 2002
From The Economist print edition


Gerhard Schröder is a brilliant tactician. But where`s the strategy?

KATS


Is Schröder losing his grip already?

SINCE his narrow election victory, Mr Schröder has sorely disappointed his party`s would-be modernisers and the dwindling number of businesspeople who think he can turn Germany`s fortunes round. A hopeful early sign was his appointment of Wolfgang Clement, until then premier of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany`s biggest Land (state), to run a beefy “super-ministry” for economics and labour. But his new team as a whole looks no keener to ram through radical reforms than the previous one.

Mr Schröder`s dismal post-election performance and apparent lack of stomach for forging boldly ahead have cast reformers into gloom. Many Germans who voted for him feel betrayed. Astonishingly, within two months of his victory, pollsters were already putting his Social Democrats 14 percentage points behind the Christian Democrats and their Bavarian allies.

In retrospect, the chancellor must consider himself extremely lucky to have held on to his job at all. In mid-summer, his chances seemed to be ebbing away. He had patently failed to keep the biggest promise he made to the German people in his first term of office—that he would bring unemployment down from 4m (around 9% of the workforce) to below 3.5m. It did come down at first, but for the past year it has been hovering around 4m again. Last spring Mr Schröder`s Social Democrats were running up to ten points behind the opposition, led by Edmund Stoiber, the worthy, socially conservative premier of prosperous Bavaria.

The chancellor was saved by a string of what turned out to be lucky breaks, and squeaked home by polling just 6,000 votes more, in an electorate of 61.4m, than the conservative combination of Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, Mr Stoiber`s Christian Social Union. The first break came with the terrible floods of August, when the Elbe river and its tributaries ravaged Saxony`s heartland and other parts of the east. Mr Schröder seized the moment, using his fabled charm to persuade the beleaguered easterners that he was their friend. He offered cash, comfort and a spirit of national solidarity. Mr Stoiber remained near-invisible.






Mr Schröder`s second break was the growing threat of war in the Middle East and the apparent readiness of President George Bush to fight Iraq. Today`s Germans are reluctant warriors, and the chancellor sensed that the mood was against the Americans. He may have genuinely believed, along with some other European leaders, that America`s approach was wrong, even if it got a United Nations mandate, but to insult his country`s most generous and steadfast post-war ally was patently self-serving.

The third break was inadvertently provided by the Free Democrats (FDP), Germany`s liberals, who might have made a coalition partner for either big party but seemed more likely to team up with the right. Earlier in the year, pollsters said they might pick up as much as 12-13% of the vote, a lot more than the Greens, Mr Schröder`s often awkward partners in the ruling coalition. But Jürgen Möllemann, then a deputy chairman of the party and its boss in North Rhine-Westphalia, got embroiled in a row over his outspoken pro-Palestinian views and alleged anti-Semitism. This made many Germans queasy. Suddenly the prospect of the liberals taking the foreign ministry, as they had done in several earlier coalitions, seemed fraught with risk. Liberal support slipped.

At the same time, the Greens benefited from the popularity of their unofficial leader and Germany`s incumbent foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, as well as from fears of war and ecological worries stirred up by the floods. On election day, they gained 8.6% of the vote against the liberals` 7.4%. With the two main parties finishing neck and neck, with 38.5% of the national vote each, that margin was just enough to ensure that the Greens would be a stronger partner for the centre-left than the liberals would be for the centre-right.

Moreover, the defects of Mr Stoiber, the conservative challenger, became plainer as the campaign wore on. The then 60-year-old Bavarian Catholic, with his rasping, schoolmasterish speech, came over as stiff and old-fashioned. He lacked his 58-year-old rival`s easy rapport, relaxed manner and deep-throated eloquence. Despite his model family life, he got far fewer women`s votes than the four-times-married chancellor. And in eastern Germany, Mr Schröder cleaned up.

That Mr Schröder is a masterly campaigner and a shrewd tactician is not in doubt. He can also be courageous, as he was when he sent German troops to Kosovo in 1999 and to Afghanistan last year. And he notched up some creditable achievements during his first four years in office. He introduced bold and sensible tax reforms, encouraged people to start making private pension provision, and gave immigrants a better deal by making it easier for them to get German nationality. Indeed, by mid-term, Mr Schröder had begun to look good. The economy started to pep up and unemployment dropped.



Steady as she goes
But about 18 months ago Mr Schröder stopped being bold and started to reinvent himself as a helmsman with a steady hand on the tiller. He gave new perks to the trade unions. When Germany`s economy began to dip again, he seemed at a loss; then, last spring, he asked Peter Hartz, an old friend from his days on Volkswagen`s supervisory board, quickly to draw up a report on improving the labour market. In July Mr Hartz suggested a number of sensible ways to get more people into work, which Mr Schröder promptly embraced.

The trouble with Mr Schröder is that he is a pragmatist, not a radical reformer. He enjoys power, but he also likes to be liked. His earlier reputation as a moderniser rested largely with his closeness to big business, particularly VW, when he was premier of the state of Lower Saxony. But he is also a creature of the cosy corporatist consensus that served his country so well in the early decades after the second world war. “We Germans do not believe in big bangs,” says one of his closest advisers. In particular, Mr Schröder does not believe in fighting against Germany`s still-powerful trade unions, who are understandably reluctant to loosen up the labour laws.

To be fair to him, if the conservatives had been returned to power, they would probably not be doing much better. After all, it was conservative governments, as much as centre-left ones, that have been responsible over the years for Germany`s high taxes and the steady rise in its labour and social-security costs. Mr Stoiber himself has a record of intervention and deal-making with companies and trade unions in Bavaria. Germany`s only truly free-market party are the liberals, who in a coalition with the conservatives might have made a difference, but probably not much.

But then Germans as a whole do not really believe that a crisis is afoot. Indeed, that was the message they conveyed by voting as they did in September. “We are not like Britain in 1979,” is a regular refrain, usually followed by the assertion that the measures applied by Britain`s then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, would not be suitable for their own country anyway. In Germany, compromise and consensus remain the order of the day. But can they still deliver the goods?

[Scarlett]

Is Deutschland AG kaputt?

Dec 5th 2002
From The Economist print edition


What`s ailing German industry

CAN this really be the country of the Wirtschaftswunder—the economic miracle that brought burgeoning growth to Germany from the end of the second world war to the mid-1980s? Since the post-unification boomlet ended in 1994, growth has averaged only 1.6% a year, the lowest rate in the European Union; this year, says Wolfgang Clement, the new economics minister, the figure may be only 0.5%; some government advisers predict even less. Foreign direct investment into Germany has been paltry, and virtually all of Germany`s biggest firms are setting up plants abroad to make products more cheaply. Bankruptcies this year are a third up even on last year`s record.






The hourly cost of labour in manufacturing industry in western Germany, including wages, social-security (including health) and pension contributions, is 13% more than in America, 43% more than in Britain and 59% more than in Spain, according to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics (see chart 3). Yet Germany`s once-admired productivity no longer outstrips its main rivals`. And although Germany has increased its exports (and is still the world`s second-biggest exporter), those of other countries have grown faster. Its global share has dipped from 11.8% in 1992 to an estimated 9.7% in 2002.

When Germany agreed to swap its cherished D-mark for the euro, it hoped that the move would do its financial markets a power of good. It didn`t. Indeed, the country`s banking system is now in crisis. In the past few months, Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank have announced lay-offs, of 14,500 and 11,000 people respectively. HypoVereinsbank, Germany`s second-biggest bank, has watched its profits dwindle and expects to make loan-loss provisions of euro3.3 billion for this year. Rumours of a liquidity problem have swirled around Commerzbank.

A merger between Deutsche and Dresdner failed miserably two years ago, and the marriage of Dresdner to Allianz, a Munich-based insurer, has been a flop. Plans two years ago for Deutsche Börse, which runs Frankfurt`s stockmarket, to take over the London Stock Exchange ended in a mess, and Frankfurt`s Neuer Markt for high-tech shares is to close soon after less than six years in business. Talk of Frankfurt taking over from the City of London as the hub of European finance has evaporated. Investment banking, in particular, has floundered as its big banks have failed to consolidate or expand. “We completely missed the boat,” says a leading Frankfurt investment banker.

The Germans have been dismayed suddenly to find their firms vulnerable to hostile foreign raiders. The takeover two years ago of Mannesmann, an engineering-cum-mobile-phone giant, by a British firm, Vodafone AirTouch (as it was then called), was a heavy psychological blow to German corporate pride. Mr Schröder at first tried to resist the takeover but eventually accepted the inevitable. “Goodbye, Germany AG,” said Rolf Breuer, then head of Deutsche Bank.



Bestriding the world or doing the splits?
Two years ago, a German business journalist, Werner Meyer-Larsen, wrote a book called “Germany Inc: The New German Juggernaut and its Challenge to World Business”. A new era, he wrote, had started in 1998 when Daimler-Benz bought America`s Chrysler, and he cited a number of other examples of German firms “thinking big” and “going west”.

Deutsche Bank bought New York`s Bankers Trust. Bertelsmann, a German publisher, bought Random House, the biggest American book-producer. Holtzbrinck, the owner of some weighty newspapers, bought three leading American publishers. Hoechst, a Frankfurt chemicals company, teamed up with a big American rival, Marion Merrill Dow, before merging with its biggest French one, Rhône-Poulenc, to become Aventis. Munich-based Allianz, Europe`s biggest insurance company, had already bought America`s Fireman`s Fund. And Europe`s Airbus, in which DaimlerChrysler`s subsidiary, DASA, is a partner, had become Boeing`s biggest competitor.

Rex


VW`s strength is its flexibility

But Mr Meyer-Larsen may have got a little carried away. For sure, the DaimlerChrysler deal marked a striking international advance for German business. Daimler-Benz`s boss, Jürgen Schrempp, the nearest thing to a business hero in Germany, seemed to be working wonders. But the business climate has got tougher, and a few years on several of those other link-ups look less triumphant.

In any event, many of Germany`s firms remain small by international standards. Of the world`s biggest 500 companies in market capitalisation, 238 are American, 50 Japanese, 36 British, 29 French and only 21 German.

One reason why Germany`s biggest firms, such as VW, stand up to world competition is that they invariably have special deals to keep their workforces flexible. For example, the number of hours worked at Wolfsburg, VW`s biggest plant, which employs over 50,000 workers, varies hugely according to the state of the market. At VW and elsewhere, millions of workers, in return for a shorter average working week, have been moving to new systems of “task fulfilment” rather than having to work a certain number of hours.



Mittelstand mutterings
The country`s Mittelstand of small and medium-sized firms enjoys less flexibility. Many of these firms would love wage bargaining to be done at company level, not—as is usual—in nationwide bargaining with one of the giant trade unions. But most of the leeway, they feel, is on the other side. For instance, it is easy for workers to report sick, and they often do. The director of one chamber of commerce notes wrily that illness strikes selectively: 70% of the time, he says, on a Monday or a Friday. When workers are sick, they get full pay for six weeks. Mittelstand managers suggest that sick pay should start at 80% of the full wage, and drop with a prolonged absence.

Another source of irritation is the right of any employee to move from full- to part-time employment, whether it suits the employer or not. This discourages firms from hiring young women who might suddenly demand time off to look after a baby. Such provisions hit smaller companies much harder than big ones.

Yet another Mittelstand gripe is that Germany`s high income-tax rates hurt the Mittelstand more than bigger firms because, being almost all family- or trust-owned, they tend to distribute profits in the form of higher pay. Mr Schröder`s cut in corporation tax was more generous than that in income tax—yet another reason why many Mittelstanders complain that the chancellor is friendly to big business but instinctively hostile to smaller capitalists like themselves.

Another big Mittelstand headache is raising credit. The big banks, they say, are unhelpful. The banks deny this, but the sort of Mittelstand companies they deal with tend to be at the top end of the scale. A score of companies that arguably qualify for the Mittelstand category (because they are unlisted, and owned by families or foundations) have a turnover that exceeds euro1 billion. These substantial Mittelstand companies include such famous names as Miele (white goods), Behr (air conditioners), Stihl (chainsaws) and Trumpf (laser-cutters), which each have a turnover of between euro1 billion and euro2 billion and employ between 5,000 and 15,000 people. It is further down the ladder that Germany`s banking system is proving inadequate to satisfy the Mittelstand`s thirst for credit.

Germans who prefer to be self-employed so that they can avoid paying salaried workers` full social-security contributions also complain that the dice are loaded against them. For example, lorry drivers who work on contract for a single company have been told that under new rules they count as part of the firm for which they deliver, adding 41% to the cost of employing them. As a result, a lot of freelance Polish truckers are now distributing goods at a cheaper rate, taking jobs from their German counterparts. In a similar vein, the director of Hanover`s chamber of industry and commerce, Wilfried Prewo, points out how much harder it is to become a taxi-driver in Germany than, say, in the United States. “Our logic is that you must always, if possible, be an employee,” he sighs.

Berthold Leibinger, the doyen of Trumpf, a classic Mittelstand firm based in Stuttgart, is another critic of restrictions that hamper entrepreneurship. “The Social Democrats don`t understand the role and importance of the Mittelstand,” he says. “They`re not pragmatic.” They`re particularly hostile, he says, to people who inherited their firms. “We`ve become a safety-crazy nation,” he says. “We need to be more risk-minded. It`s unbelievable that in two generations we`ve moved from a country that wanted to cover the world [in business] to one that is afraid of itself.”

According to an old joke among Mittelstanders, Bill Gates could not have made his fortune in Germany because it is illegal to turn a garage without a window into an office. Ah well, the jest goes on, Mr Gates would at least have ended up as a senior manager in a big corporation. But no: large German companies rarely give good jobs to university drop-outs.



Old-fashioned virtues
With so much to complain about, how do so many German firms still manage to do so well? The answer lies in good old-fashioned hard work, efficiency, attention to detail and precision, pride and high standards, particularly in engineering. In that respect, another part of the corporate tradition of German business, the apprentice system, still works well: newcomers join firms at token pay, usually for three-and-a-half years, and spend a day or more a week undergoing formal training elsewhere at the expense of the state—and then, if the firm likes them, join as full-fledged and often very loyal staff members.

Many leading businessmen—including Josef Ackermann, the (Swiss) new Deutsche Bank boss, Paul Achleitner, Allianz`s (Austrian) chief financial officer, and Gerhard Cromme, head of ThyssenKrupp`s supervisory board—are known to be frustrated by the German economy`s over-regulation. Their calls for a less restrictive regime may gradually be heard. Many of the new wave of Germany`s top businessmen have had experience in the United States, and feel that degrees in business management (such as those now offered by the Stuttgart Institute of Management and Technology, and by the European School of Management and Technology founded in Berlin in October) should be much more widely available in Germany.

“For the past ten years we haven`t been moving,” says Hans-Olaf Henkel, a former head of IBM in Germany and for a time a notably outspoken head of the Federation of German Industry (BDI). Like other go-ahead businessmen, he recites a litany of measures that would help to free the economy but concludes gloomily: “The political will just isn`t there."

[Scarlett]

Loosen up or lose out

Dec 5th 2002
From The Economist print edition


Germany has far too many rules and regulations

MOST analysts readily agree on what is wrong with the German economy. First and foremost, the labour market is far too sticky. Second, taxes and social-security contributions are too high and profits too low. Third, and not unconnected, social-security payments, pensions and health-care arrangements are too generous. And fourth, there is far too much red tape. Frustrated businessmen often say that in English-speaking countries everything is allowed unless specifically forbidden; in Germany, it is the other way round.






Mr Schröder made a useful start on tax reform in his first term by cutting corporate taxes from 52% to 39%. He also initiated a step-by-step reduction in income-tax rates, starting in 1998. The top rate was due to fall from 53% to 42% by 2005, though he decided just before the election to delay the latest scheduled cuts by a year, to help pay for flood damage. One of his more far-sighted reforms—which, to their shame, was opposed by the conservatives—was the abolition of capital-gains taxes on firms selling their cross-holdings in other companies; this, it was hoped, would encourage Germany`s corporate giants (which tend to own chunks of each other) to unbundle themselves. But then markets started to plummet, so the sell-off has been slower than expected.

One of the biggest strains on the welfare system is public pensions. On average, Germans retire at just over 60, earlier than people in most other rich countries, despite an official retirement age of 65. Pensions already swallow 12% of GDP. Compulsory pension contributions, paid half-and-half by employees and employers, have just been raised from 19.1% to 19.5% of gross wages.

But things are set to get a lot worse because the country is greying fast. Whereas currently there are two people of working age for every pensioner, on present trends there will be only one by 2035. Mr Schröder`s government last year enacted a bill that encourages people to take out private pensions, helped by a government subsidy. Starting this year, they can put 1% of their pay into a private account, rising to 4% in 2008; but so far the take-up has been slow. That may be because, by most countries` standards, state pensions remain extremely generous. They now amount to 70% of the net average national wage, but this is set to fall to 67%, using a new system of calculation, which will be the equivalent of only 64% under the old system. Workers will also be held to contributing for 45 years to draw their pension in full. The current average is 37 years.

The costs of the health-care system, into which workers and employees jointly pay another 14% of gross wages, are also spiralling out of control. The Social Democrats say they do not want a two-tier system, as in America, but accept that change will have to come. That may take the form of providing all workers with free basic health care but perhaps charging for amenities that have hitherto been taken for granted, such as generous supplies of medicine and instant access to specialists.

Unemployment benefit too is proving costly when so many people are out of a job. Benefits depend on age, length of previous service, family circumstances and so on, but at the top end of the scale a recipient with one child can get 67% of previous net income (up to a maximum of euro1,875 a month) for as long as 32 months. At the bottom end, a young jobless person who has never had a job or who has worked for less than two years is not entitled to any unemployment benefit at all—but may be eligible for (less generous) means-tested welfare assistance.

The biggest need of all, though, is to reduce unemployment itself, currently stuck at 9.8% by the Germans` own seasonally adjusted measure (or 8.3% according to EU statistics). That means at least 4.1m workers without jobs. The most vital need is to free up the labour market, in particular by making hiring and firing easier and by letting labour become cheaper. In some respects, Mr Schröder`s government has actually made matters worse in the past four years. For instance, it abolished the special status of low-paid workers in “DM630 jobs” (now known as euro325 jobs in the new currency), after the top limit on monthly earnings under this rule. Until then, employers had to pay only a modest flat-rate tax on such jobs, and employees nothing at all. They still escape, but employers now have to pay 22% in social-welfare contributions. The government also lowered the number of employees above which a company is obliged to have a works council and give workers time off for its business.






There had been hopes that Mr Schröder would continue with the liberalisation of Germany`s restrictive shopping hours embarked on in 1996, but opposition from trade unions, as well as churches, proved too strong. Since the reform six years ago shops have been able to stay open until 8pm on weekdays and 4pm on Saturdays, but still not on Sundays, with only a few exceptions. If the rules were relaxed further, the sector could offer many more job opportunities (although small shopkeepers are strongly opposed to more liberal opening hours).

The main hope for at least starting to reform Germany`s labour-cum-welfare system rests with the proposals to improve the labour market made by Peter Hartz, a top VW manager. When these were published in August, Mr Schröder instantly promised to implement them in full. If so, Mr Hartz claimed, his measures would create 2m jobs within three years. That may be too sanguine, but they would certainly make a difference.



Take Hartz
Mr Hartz`s aim was not to change the labour market from the ground up—that, he said, was not his brief—but to make job placement more efficient, as well as to encourage temporary and short-term work, which Germany`s highly regulated system currently discourages. The trade unions, which in the past have been fierce defenders of the status quo, have broadly endorsed the Hartz proposals “in principle”.

The most controversial proposal is the creation of “personnel service agencies”, to be run mostly by private temp agencies, which will take on people who have previously been unemployed and hire them out as temporary workers. Those who reject an offer of employment from such an agency will risk having their benefits docked.

Mr Hartz also tries to tackle the bottom end of the labour market to counter widespread tax evasion and create more legal jobs. One of his suggestions is for “mini-jobs” with private households, where people earning up to euro500 a month will pay no tax or social-security contributions and the employers will make a flat-rate contribution of only 10%, an improvement on the old “DM630 jobs”. Another is to give self-employed people tax incentives to set up companies (with a minimum of paperwork) known as “Me plc”, which allow them to earn up to euro25,000 taxed at a nominal rate of 10%, at the same time as collecting a state allowance that will gradually taper off over three years. Mr Hartz also wants to trim benefits for single people who refuse to accept a job simply because it would mean moving house.

In general, his proposals put more of an onus on the job-seeker to explain why a job is unsuitable before the state will provide him with welfare. All this will require a big change in expectations. The Hartz proposals would be an excellent first step towards labour-market reform, but some powerful trade unionists are beginning to grumble about the bolder of them. Depressingly, in recent weeks Mr Schröder has started to back away from his promise to adopt the lot, and started to water some of them down.

[Scarlett]

Das reicht wohl erstmal.

Ich glaube, es ist bequemer, sich die neueste Ausgabe zu kaufen und im Heft nachzulesen.

[exit4me]

zu #1-4
trotzdem danke für die fleissarbeit.
an der konsequenten realitätsverweigerung der spd wird sich nichts ändern. ihren marsch in den "demokratischen sozialismus" wird sie weiterhin unbeeindruckt fortsetzen.

[Mieter]

Das lesen sowieso wieder nur die Falschen.