Main description: Demografische Probleme waren in Deutschland und in der Welt, wenn auch aus unterschiedlichen Gründen, stets mehr oder weniger aktuell - gegenwärtig aber sind sie es ganz besonders. Wichtige Stichworte sind dabei die Ost-Erweiterung der EU, der brain drain nach den Vereinigten Staaten, aber auch ins übrige Europa, vor allem aber der absehbare drastische Bevölkerungsrückgang in Deutschland und den meisten entwickelten Ländern und umgekehrt der Zuwanderungsdruck aus den traditionellen Abwanderungsländern. Die diagnostizierten demografischen Entwicklungen bezüglich Bevölkerungszahl und ihrer strukturellen Merkmale, wie Durchschnittsalter oder Alterslastkoeffizienten, lassen sich nicht ignorieren. Das gilt leider auch für die regionale Betroffenheit - Ostdeutschland wird, nicht zuletzt aufgrund des Wanderungsverlustes von 1,5 Millionen, meist jungen Menschen zwischen 1990 und 2009, deutlich stärker getroffen als Westdeutschland.Der vorliegende Band liefert ein aktuelles Bild von Umfang, Struktur und Konsequenzen des Demografieproblems in Deutschland und zeigt Lösungs- und Reaktionsmöglichkeiten auf. Die Autoren konzentrieren sich auf die unmittelbar betroffenen Felder Familien-, Arbeitszeit- und Zuwanderungspolitik. Sie kommen zu dem Ergebnis, dass die für die Bewältigung der Probleme letztlich bedeutsamste Frage, die nach den Folgen bzw. Reaktionen von Wachstum und Produktivität, nach wie vor offen bleibt.
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Main description: The analysis of cyclical macroeconomic phenomena is an important field of econometric research. In the recent past, research interests have de-emphasized quantitative forecasting exercises and have addressed the qualitative diagnosis of the relative stance of the economy regarding "upswing", "recession", or "boom" periods, i. e. the classification of the state of the economy into a limited number of discrete states. In this context the principal challenge is to reduce the multifaceted and sometimes abundant quantitative information about the business cycle to such qualitative statements in an efficient way. For more than six years this task was the focus of the project "Multivariate determination and analysis of business cycles" within the SFB 475 "Reduction of complexity in multivariate data structures", funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).The necessity for complexity reduction is, of course, not unique to business cycle analysis but is studied in many fields and in a number of ways. This broad interest in the reduction of problem dimensionality and in the appropriate combination of data and of theory caused the RWI Essen and the Statistical Department of the University of Dortmund in January 2002 to hold a workshop at the RWI Essen where the findings of this and similar projects were presented and discussed. The present publication collects revised versions of the papers presented at this workshop. Although the workshop took place some five years ago, these papers mark an importent juncture in the development of business cycle research.
Die Bundesrepublik Deutschland ist mehr als 50 Jahre alt. Ihre Geschichte umspannt damit einen Zeitraum, den nur noch ein Teil der Zeitgenossen in vollem Umfang bewußt miterlebt hat. Dies gilt auch für die Wirtschaftspolitik. Ziel der vorliegenden Chronik ist es, eine Übersicht über die makroökonomisch bedeutsamen Maßnahmen der westdeutschen bzw. deutschen Wirtschafts-, Finanz- und Sozialpolitik sowie der Geld- und Kreditpolitik im Zeitraum 1949-2002 zu geben.
Econometric models are a widely used and powerful tool in macroeconomic analysis and forecasting. Admittedly, their acceptance by the academic community had some hard times during the seventies and eighties. The general decline in the reputation of macroeconomics, the Lucas and the Sims critique, as well as failures of the modelling community to make their models and their practice more transparent have left their marks. Closer looks at the ""critiques"", have, however, revealed their limited relevance, and the ""new/old macroeconomic consensus"" of the early 1990s seem to have restored much of the lost credibility.¤ Unfortunately this does not hold for the charge of missing transparency. More specific, it is criticised that (1) the numerous, often complex model relationships and the role and importance of endogenous/exogenous as well as other outside information are difficult to understand and (2) the models and especially their results are not free from bias, i. e. the models tell what their users want them to tell. This ""black box"" accusation is expressed in particular by members of the academic community, who, for various reasons, favor small, reductionist text book models. In contrast to this, policy makers and business economists value the informational content of large models. They are much less sceptical of these or overcome their doubts about the models by using others' models in addition to their own. The complaint about missing transparency is not new. Tinbergen's models in the 1930s were confronted with it. This complaint figured prominently in the macroeconometric model critique of the early seventies and it is still often heard today. The problem of ""reading"" or understanding macroeconometric models received some attention by employing verbal model descriptions, block diagrams, logical analysis (graphs, incidence matrices), model condensations, aggregated supply/demand curves, and implicit Phillips-curves. This, however, is not the case with respect to the generation of model forecasts. Of course, the aforementioned techniques facilitate also the understanding of the forecasting process, but the literature on this is still rare, and the problem is ignored in most econometric textbooks. The main explanation for all this is that there is not much effective user demand for model transparency. Consequently, the model industry sees no reason to improve the situation.¤ This paper deals with the possibilities of making forecast practice transparent by describing in detail the generation of a macroeconometric forecast. It should serve two main purposes. First, it structures the process of macroeconometric model forecasting using state of the art techniques. This should be a guide for producers as well as for users. Second, it provides users of these forecasts an understanding that model forecasts are not the result of ""black boxes"" but can be tracked down to hypotheses and assumptions. The model used is the model of the Rheinisch-Westfälisches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (¤ RWI), a medium sized, short term macroeconometric model for the (West) German economy. It has been regularly applied for forecasting since 1978. The forecast that is examined is the one that was made in autumn of 1996 for 1996 and 1997. The paper describes the various steps of forecast generation, shows their consequences for the final forecast and analyzes in particular the accuracy of this and some competing forecasts.¤ The next section displays some analytical foundations of econometric forecasting and error analysis. Section 3 briefly presents the model used and the macroeconomic situation in late 1996. The generation of the forecast is described in section 4, including its ex post assessment. The paper ends with a summary and conclusions. The subtitle of the paper announces a report from the trenches, hence the paper is rather dense and brief, and, equally important, it abstains from generalisations. Although the general framework is likely to hold for many macroeconometric model forecasts, the weight given to the various stages of the forecast production will vary with the purpose and the design of the model,
