Suchergebnisse

"This book assesses the United Auto Workers efforts to organize foreign vehicle plants in the South since 1989. It chronicles increased transnational union cooperation and the development of an employers' union avoidance playbook. It shows local politicians fought unionization to preserve their powerbase and that US labor law fails workers."

Since German unification, assessments of the German economy have swung from "sick man of the euro" in the early years to dominant hegemon of late. I argue that the German economy appears strong because of its recent positive performance in two politically salient areas: unemployment and the current account. A deeper assessment reveals, however, that German economic performance cannot be considered a second economic miracle, but is at best a mini miracle. The reduction in unemployment is an important achievement. That said, it was not the product of faster growth, but of sharing the same volume of work among more individuals. Germany's current account surpluses are as much the result of weak domestic demand as of export prowess. Germany has also logged middling performances in recent years regarding growth, investment, productivity, and compensation. The article also reviews seven challenges Germany has faced since unification: financial transfers from west to east, the global financial crisis, the euro crisis, internal and external migration, demographics, climate change, and upheavals in the automobile industry. German policy-makers managed the first four challenges largely successfully. The latter three will be more difficult to tackle in the future.

Among the many striking developments that arose out of the 2008-2009financial crisis and the subsequent EURO crisis has been the policy divergencebetween the United States and Germany. Typically, the two countrieshave broadly similar preferences regarding economic policy. To besure, this is not the first time that Germany and the U.S. have failed to seeeye to eye on economic matters,1 but the recent gap in perception andpolicy does warrant attention because it has been unusually large. Unlikethe famous quarrels between Jimmy Carter and Helmut Schmidt in the1970s,2 personality does not seem to play a role in this case. What thendoes explain the gulf?