Niemcy, Stany...

[Gość: Tomasz]

The slick man of Europe

America good, Germany bad - that's the received
opinion, but, economically, this view is no longer
tenable

Will Hutton
Sunday November 23, 2003
The Observer

Britain signed a landmark enterprise agreement last week with
the US to celebrate our aspiration to follow the American way.
Yet this alleged enterprise capital of the world has a trade deficit
equal to 5 per cent of its gross national product, has racked up
international debts now close to $3 trillion and last April lost its
place as number one world exporter to Germany.

This latter economy, running trade surpluses as proportionately
big as the US's trade deficits, is written off as an economic
basket case whose approach we want to avoid like the plague.
But perhaps, just perhaps, the story is a little more complicated
than America works and Germany doesn't.

To see any merit in the German economic and social model in
Britain these days is to invite howls of derision, especially from
the Treasury. And it's true that German economic performance
has not been much to write home about recently; one in 12
Germans is unemployed while economic stagnation, inflating
social expenditure and an eroded tax base have meant that the
German budget deficit has exceeded the eurozone rules for
three successive years, rules the Germans lobbied hard for.
You'd have to be a saint not to enjoy just a little Schadenfreude
at Germany's plight.

But much more is at stake. Germany stands as a proxy for
European matters economic and social, and as long as it ails
while America seems to prosper it blights the argument for
Europe, for social democracy, for stakeholding and for the euro.
The international common sense, faithfully aped by the
Government, is that while the American world of 'flexible' labour
markets and companies that seek to do no more than maximise
shareholder value may be tough, the system works in
comparison with Germany's so-called social-market economy,
mired in regulation, overpowerful trade unions, an expensive
welfare state and featherbedded unemployed.

And yet. While it may be true that German companies have to
export because demand at home is so poor, you don't get to be
number one world exporter if everything is as useless as the
country's critics allege. When Chrysler was taken over by
Daimler-Benz and Rover by BMW, the Germans were appalled
at the primitive technology and low skills of their Anglo-Saxon
rivals.

BMW's relaunch of the Mini is an object lesson in how to do
high-tech, design-led quality manufacturing. But Chancellor
Brown is not preparing to send young British entrepreneurs to
Germany to learn anything. Rather, they go to America, trailing
behind Germany in industrial sector after sector.

Capitalism US-style may have its virtues, accept the Germans,
but at heart it's a financial engineering rather than a
business-building culture - and in the long-term, creating great
businesses and international brands will pay off. German
managers are passionate about the superiority of their system
which has created great wealth-creating machines, companies
that are as attentive to their workers, customers, technology and
supply chains as they are to their shareholders. They even
believe in co-determination, where unions and managers talk
about strategy, as a means of enlisting their workers'
engagement and loyalty.

Talk to the more reflective British business leaders and they
agree; one FTSE 100 chief executive I spoke to last week
believes that Germany's great industrial brands (Siemens,
BASF, VW etc) and the system that stands behind them are
huge aces in an era of globalisation.

By contrast, Britain is virtually naked. Small wonder
Rolls-Royce, one of our last great international brands, is
threatening to move its product development overseas, citing not
just the US but Germany as examples of where the wider
structure is more supportive.

Germany's problem is not the institutions, regulations and
processes that create such formidably strong companies; it is
that it has allowed the social part of its celebrated social-market
economy to become too expensive, in particular towards the
unemployed. Too little observed outside Germany, the Germans
are now prepared to act.

Chancellor Gerhard Schr?der has bitten the bullet and for the
last six months has been engaged in an epic struggle to
persuade his party to vote for halving the time the unemployed
get unconditional unemployment pay while insisting that they
train and take up job offers where they exist. Pensions are to be
frozen for two years, and token payments introduced for health
treatment, a shock more fundamental to the German Left than
foundation hospitals.

Last week, at a conference in Bochum, he confronted his Social
D