10.11.2022 • 27/2022
Deutsche Industrie kann Gasverbrauch um ein Viertel senken ohne große Umsatzeinbußen
Eine kleine Minderheit von Produkten verursacht bei ihrer Herstellung einen Großteil des Gasverbrauchs der Industrie. Viele könnten relativ leicht durch Importe ersetzt werden, zeigt eine Analyse des Leibniz-Instituts für Wirtschaftsforschung Halle (IWH) für das Jahresgutachten der Wirtschaftsweisen. Ein Industriezweig ist besonders betroffen.
Steffen Müller
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17.08.2022 • 19/2022
Labour mobility is part of structural change
The coal phase-out will also change the affected regions in that part of the workforce will migrate. Politicians should take this process into account in structural policy, because it cannot be completely prevented. A study published by the Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH) illustrates this with a historical example.
Oliver Holtemöller
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26.04.2022 • 10/2022
Regional effects of a recession in Germany triggered by an import stop for Russian gas
A halt in Russian gas deliveries would lead to a recession in the German economy. Not all regions would be equally affected: The Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH) expects a significantly stronger slump in economic output in regions where the manufacturing sector has a large weight than elsewhere.
Oliver Holtemöller
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The Economics of Firm Productivity
Carlo Altomonte, Filippo di Mauro
Cambridge University Press,
April
2022
Abstract
Productivity varies widely between industries and countries, but even more so across individual firms within the same sectors. The challenge for governments is to strike the right balance between policies designed to increase overall productivity and policies designed to promote the reallocation of resources towards firms that could use them more effectively. The aim of this book is to provide the empirical evidence necessary in order to strike this policy balance. The authors do so by using a micro-aggregated dataset for 20 EU economies produced by CompNet, the Competitiveness Research Network, established some 10 years ago among major European institutions and a number of EU productivity boards, National Central Banks, National Statistical institutes, as well as academic Institutions. They call for pan-EU initiatives involving statistical offices and scholars to achieve a truly complete EU market for firm-level information on which to build solidly founded economic policies.
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13.04.2022 • 8/2022
From Pandemic to Energy Crisis: Economy and Politics under Permanent Stress
The German economy is steering through difficult waters and faces the highest inflation rates in decades. In their spring report, the leading German economic research institutes revise their outlook for this year significantly downward. The recovery from the COVID-19 crisis is slowing down as a result of the war in Ukraine, but remains on track. The institutes expect GDP to increase by 2.7% and 3.1% in 2022 and 2023 respectively. In the event of an immediate interruption to Russian gas supplies, a total of 220 billion euros in German economic output would be at risk in both years.
Oliver Holtemöller
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Globalisation, Productivity Growth, and Labour Compensation
Christian Dreger, Marius Fourné, Oliver Holtemöller
IWH Discussion Papers,
No. 7,
2022
Abstract
Since the onset of globalisation, production activities have become increasingly fragmented and organised in global value chains (GVC). These networks facilitate trade in intermediaries across industrial sectors and countries and change the conditions for policies to respond to shocks. In this paper, we contribute to the understanding of the effects of GVC on productivity and labour shares in advanced and emerging economies. As indicators for globalisation we use the foreign share in intermediate inputs and the foreign share in value added, extracted from international input output tables. Estimates based on local projections reveal a positive relationship between globalisation and productivity. Moreover, we are able to reject the hypothesis that a higher degree of international integration in country-industry pairs is negatively associated with the change in the labour share for advanced countries.
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IWH Medium-Term Projection According to the IWH medium-term projection of the German economy, growth in the next six...
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Firm Subsidies, Financial Intermediation, and Bank Risk
Aleksandr Kazakov, Michael Koetter, Mirko Titze, Lena Tonzer
Abstract
We study whether government subsidies can stimulate bank funding of marginal investment projects and the associated effect on financial stability. We do so by exploiting granular project-level information for the largest regional economic development programme in Germany since 1997: the Improvement of Regional Economic Structures programme (GRW). By combining the universe of subsidised firms to virtually all German local banks over the period 1998-2019, we test whether this large-scale transfer programme destabilised regional credit markets. Because GRW subsidies to firms are destabilised at the EU level, we can use it as an exogenous shock to identify bank responses. On average, firm subsidies do not affect bank lending, but reduce banks’ distance to default. Average effects conflate important bank-level heterogeneity though. Conditional on various bank traits, we show that well capitalised banks with more industry experience expand lending when being exposed to subsidised firms without exhibiting more risky financial profiles. Our results thus indicate that stable banks can act as an important facilitator of regional economic development policies. Against the backdrop of pervasive transfer payments to mitigate Covid-19 losses and in light of far-reaching transformation policies required to green the economy, our study bears important implications as to whether and which banks to incorporate into the design of transfer Programmes.
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