The economic structures are in flux. companies come and go. Biontech is relocating cancer research to Great Britain, BASF is increasingly producing basic chemicals in China, and Bayer will be doing genetic research in the USA in the future. But there are also additions. Tesla builds e-cars in Grünheide, Apple moves its design center to Munich, Intel will produce chips in Magdeburg in the future if the state coal is right. And then there is Viessmann. Is this the birth of a transatlantic climate champion, as the BMWK believes, or the further loss of climate technology from Germany? All of this highlights the structural change. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Old, industrial sectors that made Germany great and prosperous are increasingly in trouble. New, promising industries, of which we don’t have very many, are having a hard time.
And what about politics? It is still pursuing structural policy in the old-fashioned way. On the one hand, consumptive industries are fed financially and protected by regulations. The proposal for an industrial price brake is the latest coup. But selected sectors that politicians think have a promising future are also doped with subsidies. But there is also another side. Energy-intensive industries have little to smile about at the moment. Burners are banned, as are oil and gas heaters. This is climate policy with a crowbar. The “automobile cluster” Germany with over 900,000 employees at producers and suppliers is crumbling. A southern German “rust belt” is conceivable. Politicians brake and accelerate at the same time. But what is the right policy in such a situation of structural change?
Prof. Dr. Norbert Berthold (Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg) in conversation with Prof. Dr. Oliver Holtemöller (Leibniz Institute for Economic Research Halle, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg)
From the content:
Introduction (00:18)
What exactly is structural change? (03:25)
Is the “German business model” at stake? What role does ecological conversion play? (16:24)
Are politicians the better entrepreneurs? (27:39)
What do you think of the “transformative supply policy”? (36:58)
What should a good policy for structural change look like? (46:27)
The participants:
Prof. Dr. Oliver Holtemöller is deputy president of the institute. He is a professor of economics, in particular macroeconomics, at the Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg and head of the Macroeconomics department at the IWH.
From 2001 to 2003 he was a research associate in the Collaborative Research Center 373: Quantification and Simulation of Economic Processes at the Humboldt University in Berlin. From 2003 to 2009 he was junior professor for general economics at RWTH Aachen University.
He studied economics, applied mathematics and practical computer science at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen. From 1998 to 2001, he received a scholarship from the German Research Foundation (DFG) and completed the joint graduate school for applied microeconomics at Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. He received his doctorate in 2001 from the Free University of Berlin (dissertation: Vector Autoregressive Models and Monetary Policy Analysis).
Prof. Dr. Norbert Berthold is professor (em.) for economics, in particular economic order and social policy at the Julius-Maximilians-University of Würzburg. He worked at the Universities of Freiburg, Münster, Basel, Hamburg, Düsseldorf and Würzburg. Norbert Berthold is the initiator and operator of the economist blog “Wirtschaftsfreiheit” and thus also the namesake and initiator of this podcast.
