Publisher's Synopsis
The German economy has been underperforming that of the United States and the rest of Europe nearly unremittingly for 25 years. Relatively slow employment and GDP growth are not recent phenomena simply resulting from the American productivity growth surge, the German entry into the eurozone at a perhaps overvalued exchange rate, or even the costs of German reunification. Increasingly, the generous German welfare state has come under criticism, both as a partial cause of this slowdown and as an unsustainable luxury. This study argues that it is the network of special-interest protections, and not the more universal aspects of the German welfare state, that are the primary cause of Germany's economic problems. The German model of relationship banking, national wage bargaining and union-based worker training, and corporate governance to protect "stakeholders" never worked, and the German economic miracle of the postwar era came despite the model.
