Suchergebnisse

The European Union is a successful integration experiment, with an increasing number of member countries and an unexpected depth of integration. According to many indicators, it is the largest economic region in the world, leading in many "beyond GDP" indicators representing well being including non material goals. The EU has, however, lost economic dynamic in the last decades and has failed to catch up with the USA in technology and per-capita GDP. Europe has internal disequilibria, its population is ageing and it did not follow its own innovation strategy. Three questions arise in this context: 1. whether Europe should try to go back to the core (deepening integration for a smaller homogenous group), 2. whether it should go for a low road strategy of competitiveness (lowering wages and taxes, forfeiting high quality specialisation and sophisticated standards), and 3. whether it should actively try to develop its own "European Model" and offer this model to its neighbors. A European research project was tendered by the European Commission in order to analyse options for Europe in the globalised world. This 7th Framework Programme project, with the acronym "WWWforEurope", will provide evidence-based research in support of the Europe 2020 Strategy in its four-year in-depth research to be carried out by WIFO and 32 international partners. One important aspect of this strategy is a new "Systemic Industrial and Innovation Policy" (SIIP) which is pulled by the vision of a new growth path of social development and higher emphasis on sustainability. SIIP is further pushed by internal and external competition, openness as well as new technologies and capabilities. This working paper provides some first tentative answers to the three raised questions above. It furthermore sketches the broader research question, challenges and research areas to be answered in the WWWforEurope programme.

Europe is in the throes of budgetary consolidation, tightening its fiscal rules. It could not prevent the recession of 2012 and the inexorable growth of debt, especially in Southern Europe, while unemployment spreads and the social gap widens. Social policy is mostly a national matter, but is nevertheless increasingly shaped by European rules and facing some big-scale challenges. New responsibilities can no longer be funded by additional taxes as state expenditure already makes up 50 percent of the economic performance and is not even fully covered by revenues. New responsibilities can be undertaken only when problems are identified early on or even prevented outright, e.g., by an education policy or preventive health scheme, before the costs of unemployment, illness and nursing actually arise. Investment in the future and youth employment decide on the economy's competitiveness as much as on the acceptance of the European model, especially with the young. The current European growth path is socially imbalanced and chained to an ever greater consumption of resources. Modern social policy is not an isolated subpolicy but goes together with education and innovation policy and is increasingly turning international. In order to actively respond to new social problems even in a phase of budgetary consolidation as well as limit their costs it would be useful to have a social pact supplementary to the fiscal pact at a European level.

The growth performance of countries proved to be very different during the recent crisis. We apply principal component analysis to derive a single ordinal indicator on growth performance and to analyse whether initial conditions of economies or structural characteristics can explain the differences in growth performance. As initial conditions at the start of the crisis we use fiscal situation, trade competitiveness, output and credit growth, as structural characteristics we test size, openness, share of sectors and per-capita income. The task has proved to be as difficult as expected as causality often works in two ways and policy variables have intervened, which themselves are dependent on the initial conditions and structural characteristics. The three indicators that end up as the best predictors for the depth of the crisis are correlated with one another and thus difficult to disentangle.

This paper compares the depth and length of the recent crisis with the Great Depression in the 1930s. It claims that economic policy played a crucial role in shortening and curtailing the recent crisis. We analyse which policies were applied during the recent crisis and which measures worked. We know that policies relying on large infrastructure projects inherently involve an implementation lag. These lags have been very high in the recent crisis and some expenditure planned will maybe never be spent. We therefore suggest implementing a leakage rate for government expenditure programs which represents the part of intended public expenditures not spent in the first twelve months after the program is set into action. It might be higher than the savings rate out of a tax cut. Furthermore, exit strategies should ideally cut expenditure to the same extent as the increase in government spending during the crisis had been, so that sooner or later tax rates and debt rates may return to pre crisis levels. The core of the Keynesian policy recommendation is to raise expenditure in the crisis but to achieve a balanced budget over a full cycle. If expenditure is not cut after the crisis tax and/or debt rates will increase after each downturn and the basis for any Keynesian policy in the next crisis will be eroded. This does not preclude that it might be useful in the exit phase to change the tax structure in order to lower taxes on labour, specifically for low wages, while increasing taxes on financial transactions, carbon dioxide emissions, capital gains or property. This would lower unemployment and boost demand in economies with tendencies to underconsume.

The financial crisis has affected the real economy in stages yet nevertheless at an unexpected rate and with all regions being affected simultaneously. It advanced almost independently of the regions' exposure to the actual initial causes, among them the subprime crisis, innovative financial products, dubious microeconomic incentives, inefficient regulation and macroeconomic imbalances. The following analysis poses the question how the national economic structures can be made more resilient to a shock (be it a financial crisis or any other form of shock) and how economic policy can act in order to stabilise the economy before and after such a shock. This analysis supplements studies on the causes of the financial crisis, proper macroeconomic responses to the crisis and regulatory reforms on a national and international level. It enlarges the list of the traditional instruments of economic stabilisation policy by combining them with structural policies. Measures in five policy areas which could be the key to more effectively preventing a further crisis are discussed. However, a resilient economy is not in itself a political goal; it is only a necessary condition for a successful growth and employment policy. Furthermore, economic policy to increase resilience against shocks should not contain any protectionist elements since these lead to losses in income and employment levels.

This paper compares the depth of the recent crisis and the Great Depression. We use a new data set, namely seven activity indicators, to compare the drop in activity in industrialised countries. This is done under the assumption that the recent crisis levelled off in mid-2009 for production and will do so for unemployment in 2010. Our data indicate that the recent crisis did indeed have the potential to turn into another Great Depression, as shown by the speed and simultaneity of the decline during the first nine months. However, if we assume that a large second dip can be avoided, the drop in all indicators overall will have been smaller than during the Great Depression. This holds true specifically for GDP, employment and prices, but is less true for manufacturing output. The difference in the depth of the crises reflects the differences in policy reaction. This time monetary policy and fiscal policy were applied courageously, speedily and were partly internationally coordinated. For several years during the Great Depression fiscal policy tried to stabilise budgets instead of aggregate demand, and either monetary policy was not applied or it was rather ineffective insofar as deflation turned lower nominal interest rates into higher real rates. Only future research will be able to prove the exact impact of economic policy, but the current tentative conclusion is that economic policy prevented the recent crisis from developing into a second Great Depression. This is also a partial vindication for economists. The majority of them might not have been able to predict the crisis, but it shows that the science did learn its lessons from the Great Depression and was able to give decent policy advice to at least limit the depth of the recent crisis.

Die Weltwirtschaft ist 2009 zum ersten Mal seit Mitte des vorigen Jahrhunderts nicht gewachsen. Die Wirtschaftsleistung dürfte um 2% zurückgegangen sein, in den Industrieländern um 3,5%. Dies war die Folge der Finanzkrise, sie hat zu einem Einbruch des Welthandels mit Folgen auf alle realwirtschaftlichen Aktivitäten geführt. Wir beschreiben die starken Veränderungen in den Rahmenbedingungen, wie sie schon vor der Krise weltweit und für Österreich im Besonderen eingetreten sind. Dann geben wir einen Überblick über Verlauf und Ursachen der Finanzkrise, die Reaktion der Wirtschaftspolitik und die zusätzlichen Herausforderungen durch die Krise.

The financial crisis has brought about an economic recession which is more severe and widespread than any decline in production in the past 50 years. In the USA and Europe the decline in production over the entire economy was, however, much less than during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Only in manufacturing has the decline in some quarters of 2008-09 been equally sharp. This time, however, the economic policy makers reacted differently. The high income levels at the start of the crisis and the social systems in place were able to cushion the fall. The roots of the crisis are not only to be found in the financial sector but also in macroeconomic imbalances, in regulation failures and insufficient policy coordination. Previous experience shows that the length of the crisis will vary between the financial markets, the housing sector, production and employment, and that recovery could be slow, bumpy and fragile. Different approaches of economic policy are being systematically compared and we already discuss how the crisis can actually be turned into an opportunity. One even dares to suggest that some of the elements of the European Model (long-term orientation, stakeholder model) could serve as an example to the world, even if the crisis management in Europe is not without fault, and despite the fact that in the USA and China economic policy is reacting more decisively. It is necessary to coordinate European policy more closely internally as well as with that of the USA and of the dynamic economies of neighbouring countries and Asia in order to avoid further crises, and to proactively tackle worldwide problems such as climate change, and raw materials and food shortages.

This paper investigates to which extent tough competition impacts on the macroeconomic performance of countries. The relation between competition and innovation has been investigated intensely in industrial economics. It started with Schumpeter's hypothesis that monopoly profits were necessary for innovation, leading then to U-curve relationships where innovation was highest for medium-range competition, but lower for very tough competition as well as for a very lax competitive regime. Empirical studies on the growth differences between countries increasingly stress – apart from the usual suspects like investment, R&D, human capital – the role of institutions. They include indicators on regulation, government size, corruption and rule of law, but usually not the degree of competition. Conventional growth theory did not model the impact of competition, but assumed perfect competition. In New Growth Theory, economic growth depends on purposeful and maximising innovation activities, where market structure plays an important role. But this did not result in the inclusion of competition variables into empirical growth equations. We have attempted to narrow this gap by relating 13 indicators of the toughness of competition to macroeconomic performance. We then added these competition indicators to an equation relating macro performance to the standard explanatory variables for economic growth (like investment and R&D). The results indicate that competition plus innovation is a good recipe at the macro level too, probably with similar tensions and non-linearity as at the company level.

"Obwohl Wirtschaftswachstum nur eines der wirtschaftspolitischen Ziele ist, nimmt es insofern eine zentrale Stellung ein, als ohne Wachstum auch Vollbeschäftigung, Budgetausgleich und Vorsorgen für Risken und Alterung nur mit sehr viel schärferen wirtschaftspolitischen Eingriffen erzielbar sind. Maßnahmen sind nötig, die die Mobilität, Wahlfreiheiten von Personen und Firmen beschneiden und erworbene Rechte in Frage stellen. Selbst ökologische Probleme, die zunächst durch Wachstum tendenziell verstärkt werden, verschärfen sich in Perioden schwächeren Wachstums, da Investitionen und Finanzmittel sinken. Österreich kann in den letzten 10 Jahren, nachdem die Wirtschaft traditionell immer schneller gewachsen ist und das Einkommen das der EU-15 um 10 Prozent überschritten hat, keinen Wachstumsvorteil mehr verbuchen (außer gegenüber Deutschland). Die Ursachen liegen unter anderem darin, dass Strategieelemente, die das Wachstum eines Nachzüglers fördern, für ein Spitzenland in Einkommen und Wohlstand nicht mehr verfügbar sind und die für ein Spitzenland notwendigen Stärken in Österreich noch nicht forciert wurden. Elemente einer Strategie, den Wachstumspfad von derzeit prognostizierten 2,3 Prozent auf 3 Prozent zu heben, werden skizziert. Der Wachstumspfad soll einem europäischen Modell entsprechen, mit einem hohen Stellenwert sozialer und ökologischer Ziele. Er sollte in ein strategisches Konzept eingearbeitet sein, das auf einem Grundkonsens von Experten und Wirtschaftspartnern aufbaut." (Autorenreferat)