Re: Der Economist über Deutschland - Artikelserie (4) Mit Anhang für @Wal B.

verfasst von Popeye, 06.12.2002, 10:40

-->Is the sun rising in the
east at last?
Dec 5th 2002
From The Economist print edition


The mood in the"new states" is beginning to
brighten

THE figures still look dismal. More than a fifth of the
east German labour force is out of work, if you
include those on the government's short-term
job-creation schemes. Average wages are still only
77% of west German levels. Life in much of the"new
Länder", as the former communist east is known,
remains glum. The brightest and best of eastern
youngsters still tend to head west. The downturn in
the world economy has battered many new eastern
companies. More recently, even nature has been
hostile: the floods along the Elbe river in August
wrought damage now put at euro9.2 billion, most of
it in Saxony.
[img][/img]
Even so, prospects in
the east are, on
balance, distinctly
more hopeful than
they were. Some parts
of the region have
started to exude a
new sense of purpose,
confidence and
creativity.
Manufacturing output
has shot up. Clusters
of automotive,
electronic and
high-tech industry are
beginning to form,
especially in Thuringia
and Saxony, which
were hubs of German
industry before the
second world war.

Bernhard Vogel, the
Christian Democratic
premier of Thuringia,
says that it no longer
makes sense to talk
about eastern as
opposed to western
states. He points out that his capital, Erfurt, is
actually further west than Munich, its Bavarian
counterpart. Saxons and Thuringians are beginning to
promote themselves as"Middle Germans"-as distinct
from their poorer compatriots from Mecklenburg-West
Pomerania and Brandenburg, the Land that surrounds
Berlin.

Yet despite the vast dollops of cash and subsidies
that have flown east, progress is slow. Since the end
in 1995 of the construction-driven boom that followed
unification, the area's economy has grown at about
half the (already snail-like) pace of Germany's
western states. Last year the eastern economy
shrank, and this year it probably stood still.

Yet huge amounts of money continue to flow east. By
the end of this year the tally of net transfers since
unification will have reached about euro800 billion,
nearly twice this year's budget for the whole of
Germany. Last year the east received net transfers of
euro75 billion. And Mr Schröder has agreed to a final
"solidarity package", mainly to boost infrastructure
investment, that will be dispensed from 2005 until
2019, worth a total of euro156 billion. All this is
courtesy of German taxpayers, eastern as well as
western, though the westerners, being richer and
much more numerous, are stumping up the vast
majority of it.


Buds of hope

It would be an exaggeration to say that the east now
presents the"blooming landscapes" which Helmut
Kohl, the chancellor at the time of unification,
unwisely predicted in the first rush of euphoria; but
progress has been immense. By virtually every
material yardstick, life has improved. Rivers and air
are incomparably cleaner. More than 800,000 new
houses have been built since 1993, and the old
central squares of just about every eastern town
have been fastidiously restored. The new telephone
system is as good as any in Europe. New motorways
link up every corner of the region. Even the poorest
and most isolated little towns have shops stocked
with a range of foods that would have been
unimaginable in communist times. Car ownership has
nearly trebled since 1989, and the wheezing old
Trabant, old East Germany's family car for which
eager buyers had to wait an average of nine years, is
now a museum-piece.

Wages have nearly doubled in real terms since
unification, GDP per head is up by 62% and pensions
have soared-but there has been little or no growth
in any of these since 1997. Labour productivity, by
some calculations, has risen from 57% of western
Germany's figure to 78% today, and in some
manufacturing sectors it is as high or higher. Since
1990, more than three-quarters of industrial plant
has been replaced. Even the retired and jobless,
distressing as their plight remains, are financially
better off than in communist times.

For sure, many Ossis (easterners), especially older
ones, have yet to recover from the trauma of
unification; some never will. After all, in its
immediate aftermath, 7.5m of the east's 10m workers
lost their jobs as whole industries were shut down.
The number of industrial workers has plummeted from
7m to 700,000. The size of the labour force has
shrunk by a third. And the 16.4m people who were
living in the east in 1989 have come down by 1.8m,
many of whom are reckoned to have moved over to
the western side.

All this still haunts many easterners. They do not
enjoy being told that 8,000 people now produce the
same amount of steel in the east as 86,000 did a
decade ago, or that the 40,000 Saxons still working
on the land now grow more farm produce than
200,000 did in 1990. Nearly all public-sector workers
in the east, doing exactly the same work as their
western compatriots, still get, on average, only 90%
of the western rate-and have to work 90 minutes
longer per week for it.

Even in firms such as VW, where thousands of Ossis
would be delighted to get a job, rates of pay and
conditions in east German plants differ sharply from
those in the west. At VW's biggest German plant, in
Wolfsburg, not far from the western city of Hanover,
the average working week is now 31.5 hours. Many of
the workers have a four-day week. In Dresden, in
Saxony, the average is 38 hours, and a six-day week
is quite common. Yet pay rates in the east are
considerably lower. Five-sixths of eastern industrial
firms, covering one-third of industrial workers there,
have opted out of collective wage-bargaining. The
Saxon minister for the economy, Martin Gillo, says
that, because average productivity in the east is still
well below western levels, even with its lower labour
costs the east is still not fully competitive.


Saxon angles

It is bad luck on the northern half of the old German
Democratic Republic that the best economic
prospects are concentrated further south, on a
220km-long corridor running more or less along the
A4 motorway from Erfurt to Leipzig and on via
Zwickau and Chemnitz through to Dresden. This is
where, under the so-called Leuchtturmpolitik
(lighthouse policy), business and government
promote investment in beacons of industry and
research that might bolster the local Mittelstand.

It seems to be working, thanks partly to large federal
subsidies for investment. The Saxons boast that
theirs is the only state in Germany where three car
makers have chosen to invest in new plants: BMW
and Porsche near Leipzig, VW in Mosel, near Zwickau,
and in Dresden. All three firms say they are happy
with the results. All insist that the quality of their
workers is as good as in their western plants.

In Dresden, it is hoped that a high-tech cluster will
form around two firms that specialise in
semiconductors: Infineon, a spin-off from Siemens,
and AMD, an American outfit headquartered in
California's Silicon Valley. The pair have recently set
up a high-tech joint venture with another American
firm, Du Pont. Mr Gillo used to run AMD in Dresden
until he became Saxony's economics minister earlier
this year. He was born in Leipzig but has spent a
good chunk of his working life in Silicon Valley, and
he is bubbling with eagerness to see Dresden take
off as a high-tech centre. Some 500 small software
companies, he says, have sprung up in the area in
the past few years.

Dresden is a marvellous mixture of old and new. The
old city centre is an architectural jewel. According to
its liberal mayor, the city is already Germany's sixth
most popular tourist destination. In 2005 the
exquisite Frauenkirche, flattened by Allied bombers in
February 1945 in a raid that killed 25,000, will reopen
after a meticulous resurrection, virtually stone by
stone: a fitting symbol of Dresden's rebirth after six
decades of totalitarian blight.


Serene again, the Elbe at Dresden


A notable change over the past few years has been
the growth of a fierce new sense of local pride. Kurt
Biedenkopf, the Christian Democrat who was Saxony's
premier for the first decade after unification, says
regaining that pride is the Saxon people's greatest
achievement. But elsewhere in the east, too, the
sense of having been taken over and done down by
the west is fading.

After unification, almost the entire old establishment
of the German Democratic Republic was swept away.
Nearly all managers in industry and most university
professors were chucked out, as were any
public-sector workers with links to the Stasi, East
Germany's secret police. Easterners, it was felt, were
on the scrapheap.


Ossis rule OK

No longer. Five years after Mr Biedenkopf, once the
Christian Democrats' general secretary, took over the
running of Saxony (a post to which he was twice
handsomely re-elected), his entire government was
still made up of westerners, bar one Ossi. Now the
only Wessis in the Saxon government are his
successor as premier, Georg Milbradt, and his
economics minister, Mr Gillo-who left the east as a
child.

Eastern politics are beginning to reflect that new
confidence. In the early 1990s Christian Democrats
had swept the board in the east, thanks largely to Mr
Kohl's status as Germany's great unifier. They still
run Saxony and Thuringia and now also, in coalition,
Saxony-Anhalt. However, within a few years many
easterners were voting for the comforting certainties
promised by the Democratic Socialists, a repackaged
version of the old communists. Strikingly, in
September's general election the ex-communist vote
dived, because easterners now feel less need for a
home-based party to bolster their identity.

In turn, Wessis, especially younger ones, are finding
it easier to get along with Ossis. The cultural and
social gap that was so apparent ten years ago is
narrowing. The most striking sign of this is the surge
of young Wessis at eastern universities, where more
than a quarter of students now hail from the west. To
be sure, there are practical reasons: the cost of living
is lower, eastern universities are easier to get into,
the staff-to-student ratio is more favourable, and
academic standards remain fairly high. But social
reasons play a part too."My son used to think Ossis
were really weird," says a western editor whose son
has gone to university in Saxony."But now he says
they're more interesting." Not that social divisions
have suddenly gone. A writer in Hamburg says most
middle-class Wessi parents would still sigh if their
son introduced his bride-to-be as"Nina from
[eastern] Magdeburg".

The other remarkable thing about the east is the way
nearly all the region's businessmen and politicians
complain about the burden of regulation, inflexible
labour laws, high wages and social costs-just like
their colleagues in the west."The new states just
aren't strong enough to bear the financial and
regulatory burdens of the west," says Mr Biedenkopf,
who can take much credit for luring western and
especially high-tech business to Saxony.

Eastern leaders argue for more exemptions from
onerous rules. But many Ossi workers, still
egalitarian by instinct, fear that looser rules for
business in the east might cause workers to be
exploited."We are all Germans now," is a common
cry. That was why it was agreed in principle that
wages and social benefits, although slightly lower in
the east to begin with, should gradually converge. Mr
Schröder has recently confirmed that within a few
years public-sector wages must catch up. Alas, the
sooner they do, the worse for Ossi job-seekers.

Anhang für @Wal:
Sources
Dec 5th 2002
From The Economist print edition


The author would like to thank many people across
Germany for their advice and kindness in taking the
trouble to discuss their country so frankly. None of
them bears responsibility for any mistakes or
misjudgments in this survey.

Among the many people, organisations and
companies that helped the author are:

Dr Andreas Busch of the Centre for European Politics,
Economics and Society, University of Oxford;
Ambassador Leopold Bill von Bredow, Dr Martin
Koopmann and Dr Angelika Volle at the German
Council on Foreign Relations, Berlin; Professor Lord
Dahrendorf; The Konrad Adenauer Stiftung; Katrin
Bether and Dr Katharina Schöps of the RKW Sachsen
management consultancy; Gabor Steingart and
Joachim Preuss at Der Spiegel; Peter Senft at IG
Metall in Berlin; Hanns-Eberhard Schleyer of the
Zentralverband des Deutschen Handwerks in Berlin
and his press officer, Alexander Legowski; Manfred
Güllner of the Forsa polling agency; Ashley Carmody
at the Allensbach Institute; Prof Dr Klaus
Zimmermann of the Deutsche Institut für
Wirtschaftsforschung; Lutz Raetig of Morgan Stanley;
The Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie; The
Dachorganisation der Gewerkschaften in Deutschland;
Claus Strunz, editor-in-chief, Bild am Sonntag;
Professor Barbara John of the Beauftrage für
Migration und Integration des Senats von Berlin; Dr
Günter Rexrodt of the Federal Democratic Party;
Christoph Keese, Wolfgang Münchau and Thomas
Hanke of FT Deutschland; Cem Ã-zdemir of the Green
Party; Dr Alfred Tacke, state secretary, Ministry of
Economics; Daniel John Nicolai of the English
Theatre, Frankfurt; Stefan Schulte of VW in Dresden
and Dr Christoph Bertram of the Stiftung
Wissenschaft und Politik in Berlin; Dr Josef Joffe,
editor of Die Zeit; Walter Allwicher of the Deutsche
Börse in Frankfurt; Dr Ralph Solveen of Commerzbank
in Frankfurt; Dr Hans Tümmers and Dr Keith Goffin of
the Stuttgart Institute of Management and
Technology; Andreas Richter of Stuttgart's chamber of
commerce and industry; Professor Dr Lothar Späth,
chairman of Jenoptik; Dr Wilfried Prewo of the
chamber of commerce and industry in Hanover; and
Prince and Princess Michael and Philippa Salm-Salm of
Wallhausen.
Quelle: Economist vom 6.12.02 (nur Abo)

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gesamter Thread:

• Der Economist über Deutschland - Artikelserie (1) - Popeye, 06.12.2002, 09:29
  • Re: Der Economist über Deutschland - Artikelserie (2) - Popeye, 06.12.2002, 09:33
    • Re: Der Economist über Deutschland - Artikelserie (3) - Popeye, 06.12.2002, 09:42
      • Britische Kapitalisten sagen aller Welt, wo's lang geht? LOL! (owT) - Wal Buchenberg, 06.12.2002, 10:08
        • auch so mancher deutsche Marx-Fan versucht das gelegentlich ;-) owT - silvereagle, 06.12.2002, 10:13
          • @silvereagle, der unabhängige Kopf - Wal Buchenberg, 06.12.2002, 12:04
            • Take it easy, Wal - silvereagle, 06.12.2002, 13:20
        • Gestern seltsame Pressekonferenz des Economist in Berlin - El Sheik, 06.12.2002, 10:25
      • Re: Der Economist über Deutschland - Artikelserie (4) Mit Anhang für @Wal B. - Popeye, 06.12.2002, 10:40