7 ms·

Germany set to eclipse Japan as No. 3 economy in 2023, IMF says

39 points by mikhael 3y ago

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>Japan and Germany [...] share similar challenges — including their businesses being heavily reliant on fax machines, which are often used as an emblem of unshakable bureaucracies as both markets face an uphill battle to digitize. Preach it brother. >However, Germany lacks Japan’s unique currency woes. Being part of an entire continent and a monetary union, instead of tiny isolated island definitely works in favor of Germany. Also, dupe from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37998619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37998619
- Barrin92 3y ago
  >Preach it brother. Being German I'm extremely sceptical about "digitalization" evangelism in particular when it comes to bureaucracy, because in reality it means you now have 1500 emails rather than 20 pieces of paper to deal with. It's a sort of fake progress that often seems more about workplace control. Everyone messaging you on slack every five minutes isn't going to make you more productive. It's interesting that in Britain, often hailed as ab example in terms of digitalization, total factor productivity is almost flat for 15 years.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >Being German I'm extremely sceptical about "digitalization" evangelism in particular when it comes to bureaucracy, because in reality it means you now have 1500 emails rather than 20 pieces of paper to deal with. Haha, I can totally tell from your skepticism to digitalization that you're German and I agree with your take that that's exactly how digitalization is or will be handled in Germany. Per its track record, if there is a way digitalization could make something annoying even worse, then I am 100% confident that Germany will find it and implement it. While in the UK/NL or Scandinavia digitalization means replacing 20 pieces of paper with one web form, in Germany I totally expect those 20 pieces of paper to be replaced with 1500 emails while also pissing away hundreds of millions of taxpayer Euros in the process to politically connected consultancy firms only to end up with a worse result than when things were paper based. This would be the most typical German government thing ever. >It's a sort of fake progress that often seems more about workplace control. Everyone messaging you on slack every five minutes isn't going to make you more productive. Everyone trapping on your shoulder in person every 5 minutes will make you easily just as unproductive or more. Has it occurred to you in your example that the interruptions are the main problem and not the communication medium? At least on slack I can disable notifications or close the app. I can't disable my helicopter boss from buzzing me in person. >It's interesting that in Britain, often hailed as ab example in terms of digitalization, total factor productivity is almost flat for 15 years. What are you talking about? How's productivity are you referring to? Bureaucracy in Britain is massively simpler than in Germany, both for businesses and for citizens.
    - toyg 3y ago
      > pissing away hundreds of millions of taxpayer Euros in the process to politically connected consultancy firms only to end up with a worse result That also happens in the UK, don't worry - except in British Pounds. > Bureaucracy in Britain is massively simpler than in Germany It is. The counterpoint is that fraud is rampant and cronyism is the order of the day. A lot of stuff that in DE/FR/IT would be pursued by law enforcement as corruption is just part and parcel of public life here in UK.
  - spandrew 3y ago
    Sorry, but this is not accurate: People messaging over Slack 100% makes us more effective. Like any technology, including printing 20 pages of status report, there are ways to be efficient with them, and ways to be inefficient with them. The workforce right now are growing up as digital natives. Time to act like it.
    - droopyEyelids 3y ago
      The concept you're missing is that a barrier to communication, like sending the fax, forces one to organize their thoughts before impinging on another person's time. So while digital communication has a lower round trip time, it also has a lower barrier to entry, which means you get more communications and they're less focused. This leads to situations like my inbox, with 50 messages a day that are parts of huge unfocused threads and it can take 5 minutes of diligent effort to find out if my attention is even required, and at that point my 'action' will probably be to reply to the thread asking for clarification, setting off the same bullshit task for all the people CC'ed
      - an_aparallel 3y ago
        wonder if this is an opportunity for some enterprising individual to sell llm powered "idea distillation before hitting send" (as a service)...that was intended as a joke...but i can see it being great hahaha.
      - whatisyour 3y ago
        When has increased barrier to communication ever been good? It's better to reduce barrier and change training rather increase barrier as a punishment.
        hotnfresh 3y ago
        > When has increased barrier to communication ever been good? Phone call costs used to mean you probably wanted to answer every phone call you received, rather than missing calls you should have answered because you're so used to ignoring them since most are spam and fraud. IDK about good in terms of humanity or whatever, but if I could snap my fingers and set a $0.05/minute rate on all phone calls, and $0.15 for long distance connections of any kind, I'd do it, because it'd be a net-improvement for everyone I know. > It's better to reduce barrier and change training rather increase barrier The medium is the message. You want to change the message, look at the medium, not the people.
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    Hard agree. Seen too much shit like Kanban boards suddenly sucking because they’re digital and limitless instead of physical and limited in size, or schools sending avalanches of mostly-useless email and other digital messages home where before you’d just have gotten a handful of paper notes in the mail or sent home with kids.
  - irrational 3y ago
    Wait, hold up. Are you saying that anytime you need to ask a coworker, or maybe someone one a different team, a question you send a fax instead of slacking them? Do you all have fax machines in your homes?
  - syntheweave 3y ago
    It's similar to issues encountered with previous eras of industrialization: when you have a factory, you can make a lot of one thing. So you reshape society around that thing, and now one size fits all, even if it doesn't. The thing digitalization solved was the paperwork bottleneck(access to raw data), not the information bottleneck(what people need to know to do their jobs). We have a surplus of global firehose information systems, but a scarcity of useful filtering mechanisms, most of them based on traditional indexing(date/time, alphabet, keyword search) or a black box algorithm that usually isn't tuned for your scenario. As well, there are a lot of unaddressed problems with data custody, where access controls tend to be very all-or-nothing and bespoken, and aren't generalized to the whole operating system.
- tidwall 3y ago
  Japan is geographically larger than Germany. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
  - ericpauley 3y ago
    Germany is part of the European Union, which is 10x larger than Japan and a sixth of world GDP.
    - deepsun 3y ago
      Why sixth? EU's GDP is #2 (nominal) lagging very slightly to US [1], or #3 by PPP. Germany's GDP is #3 (nominal) or #5 (PPP) [2]. [1] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPSH@WEO/EU/CHN/USA https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPSH@WEO/EU/CHN/USA [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Germany UPDATE: fixed the statement, previous was about world trade share.
      - aidenn0 3y ago
        Not #6 but "a sixth" as in 1/6 of the total GDP of the world.
      - hollerith 3y ago
        >EU's GDP is #2, greatly surpassing US Your link [1] shows that the EU surpasses US in international trade, not in GDP.
        deepsun 3y ago
        Yep, fixed (you're too fast! :). Although the statement still holds, but it's "slightly" not "greatly" now.
      - AlchemistCamp 3y ago
        Not quite sure what you're getting at, but that claim is not true. The US economy was roughly comparable in size to the EU's 15 years ago but is now nearly 1/3 larger than the EU + UK, or about 1/2 larger than the EU without the UK: https://www.ft.com/content/80ace07f-3acb-40cb-9960-8bb4a44fd8d9 https://www.ft.com/content/80ace07f-3acb-40cb-9960-8bb4a44fd...
- gumballindie 3y ago
  > Being part of an entire continent and a monetary union, instead of tiny isolated island definitely works in favor of Germany. Controling said continent and ensuring policy is tilted in your favour tends to help. Bonus points if your resources are supplied by dictatorial regimes that start wars with or threaten your neighbours keeping them docile.
lispm 3y ago
Productivity: GDP per hour worked, 2022, OECD. Japan 53.2 USD Germany 88 USD
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
  Isn’t that heavily skewed by Japan’s culture of being in the office for obscenely long stretches? Not that they necessarily have to be productive, but the expectation is to be present.
  - pizzalife 3y ago
    Yes. If they didn't have to spend every waking hour at work, things like raising a family would be conceivable. Everything is connected and that's part of the reason why Japan's population pyramid is a disaster.
  - MandieD 3y ago
    And German office culture is even less presentee-ist than American. Unless you have a relatively high salary, you have a 35-40 hour contract full time, with a lot of us on part time contracts. Pre-Covid, we really were only around for those set hours, with a few flextime accumulated here and there, then burned off within the year. Even with home office, people still tend to stick to their contract hours. Your employer would be a bit suspicious if you were routinely in the office or logged into the VPN longer than you were booking…
- TulliusCicero 3y ago
  Yes, though the yen being real weak also affects this.
swyx 3y ago
the fact that Japan has wallowed in the backwaters since the 1980s is endlessly fascinating to me. Can't think of another country that had so much potential just voluntarily squander it away because of.. bad culture?
- permo-w 3y ago
  wallowed in the backwaters is a bit strong. it's still the world's 3rd/4th largest economy with the 12th largest population
  - swyx 3y ago
    yea i knkow... i struggled to describe the feelings i had about japan, this is the best i had lol. open to suggestions. but primarily thinking of: - nikkei/real estate not past its dotcom peak - telecoms/internet infra generally 1 generation behind most other developed countries - anecdotally seemingly very hostile/unstable politics especially to women and immigrants - i vaguely remember some revisionist history around their ww2 atrocities?
    - permo-w 3y ago
      absolutely booming culturally though. food, tv, comic books, video games, trading cards all extremely popular the world over, which cannot be said for any other nation besides the US, which is almost 3x the size and hasn't earned that position on merit the same way Japan has
    - throwawaymaths 3y ago
      How about Rested on the laurels of its postwar boom?
    - mitthrowaway2 3y ago
      IMO, the lower the real estate valuations, the better. Cheap real estate is one of the main points Japan has in its favor right now. Cheap transportation, cheap food, and cheap electricity all contribute to a healthy economy; cheap real estate is no different. On the telecom side, as with so many others, Japan squandered their early lead by being extremely inward-focused, as usual. Despite their export-oriented economy and a few giants like Toyota and Sony, most Japanese companies are rarely interested in looking beyond their (shrinking) domestic market, resulting in "Galapagos syndrome", where diverse and sophisticated domestic technologies evolve in isolation from the rest of the world, only to eventually be crushed when global competitors catch up and subsequently pass them.
Axsuul 3y ago
When will California eclipse Japan then?
- civilitty 3y ago
  Germany broke $2 trillion GDP around 2002, so it took about 20 years to overcome Japan. California broke $2T GDP around 2011 so it'll probably take another decade for California to overcome Japan.
- TulliusCicero 3y ago
  If the yen gets even weaker, it could happen real soon!
simonebrunozzi 3y ago
Fun fact, for a brief moment Italy was the world's 4th largest economy (after USA, Japan and Germany) in the 1980s. 1987: US $4,855B Japan $2,532B Germany $1,298B Italy $805B UK $745B
- darknavi 3y ago
  Why? What caused the boon at the time?
  - valzam 3y ago
    I mean it's still the 8th biggest economy in the world, so not exactly small. People always find this very surprising giving all the issues the country has but the north has many centuries of high-end manufacturing history. In particular very expensive, very specialised machines used in manufacturing of everything else.
  - kulahan 3y ago
    really good pasta harvest
  - toyg 3y ago
    The industrial sector was riding the long wave of public investment started with the Marshall Plan. The Socialist Party was brought into government in the early 1960s (to lock out the larger Communist Party), and ensured the robust program of public funding for industrial efforts (and civil servants) would continue and expand. This created a feedback loop whereby public debt would grow, forcing currency devaluation, which boosted exports, which made the system look so successful that further increasing public debt was seen as acceptable - and so on and so forth. In addition, a few underdeveloped regions exploited the deflated exchange rates to bootstrap cheap manufacturing, particularly in the North-East, right about that time. The game came crashing down in the early '90s, when credit markets pulled the plug as the debt/gdp ratio hit triple digits and looked out of control. The only way to re-establish credibility was to dramatically cut spending and increase taxes (infamously, one year the government made an overnight withdrawal from all private bank accounts over a certain balance, completely unannounced!) and hook Italian fortunes to the European integration effort, piggybacking on the almighty Deutschemark. This stabilised things but effectively ended the boom times for good, since we cannot compete at the cheap end anymore. Still, the country continues to be a solid G8 member and produces a lot of excellent fare - the world queues up to buy Italian brands, from automotive to food, and most of them are absolutely worth the money. Among other things, chances are that your sunglasses and eyeglasses are made in Italy, even if you don't know it.
xutopia 3y ago
Germany is also allowing lots of immigration and this helps their economy by having an available workforce.
- ruiisnwn 3y ago
  The citizens will have no claim on any national divident or claim of ownership. Whats the point if they have no borders and no country.
grahamgooch 3y ago
In ten years it won’t matter. The top 3 in the world will be USA, China and India. Then it will become China, india and USA. Unless Germany and Japan change their birth rates they will start shrinking https://www.indiatoday.in/business/story/india-to-surpass-germany-and-japan-to-become-world-third-largest-economy-by-2023-sp-global-survey-2453053-2023-10-24 https://www.indiatoday.in/business/story/india-to-surpass-ge...
- api 3y ago
  China's birth rate is much lower than the US, but both are below replacement. US is only slightly below. India is slightly above, but falling. IMHO the countries to dominate the 21st century will be those that attract the largest number of high quality immigrants. Countries that do not will stagnate. Countries that drive quality people away (brain drain) will collapse. The US has an huge advantage there unless we stupidly close our borders because of racism and fear. China will fare poorly if rising authoritarianism and low birth rates lead to both declining population and population loss. Nobody migrates to authoritarian countries unless they have nowhere better to go and are fleeing something a lot worse.

39 points by mikhael 3y ago

>Japan and Germany [...] share similar challenges — including their businesses being heavily reliant on fax machines, which are often used as an emblem of unshakable bureaucracies as both markets face an uphill battle to digitize. Preach it brother. >However, Germany lacks Japan’s unique currency woes. Being part of an entire continent and a monetary union, instead of tiny isolated island definitely works in favor of Germany. Also, dupe from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37998619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37998619

Barrin92 3y ago
>Preach it brother. Being German I'm extremely sceptical about "digitalization" evangelism in particular when it comes to bureaucracy, because in reality it means you now have 1500 emails rather than 20 pieces of paper to deal with. It's a sort of fake progress that often seems more about workplace control. Everyone messaging you on slack every five minutes isn't going to make you more productive. It's interesting that in Britain, often hailed as ab example in terms of digitalization, total factor productivity is almost flat for 15 years.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >Being German I'm extremely sceptical about "digitalization" evangelism in particular when it comes to bureaucracy, because in reality it means you now have 1500 emails rather than 20 pieces of paper to deal with. Haha, I can totally tell from your skepticism to digitalization that you're German and I agree with your take that that's exactly how digitalization is or will be handled in Germany. Per its track record, if there is a way digitalization could make something annoying even worse, then I am 100% confident that Germany will find it and implement it. While in the UK/NL or Scandinavia digitalization means replacing 20 pieces of paper with one web form, in Germany I totally expect those 20 pieces of paper to be replaced with 1500 emails while also pissing away hundreds of millions of taxpayer Euros in the process to politically connected consultancy firms only to end up with a worse result than when things were paper based. This would be the most typical German government thing ever. >It's a sort of fake progress that often seems more about workplace control. Everyone messaging you on slack every five minutes isn't going to make you more productive. Everyone trapping on your shoulder in person every 5 minutes will make you easily just as unproductive or more. Has it occurred to you in your example that the interruptions are the main problem and not the communication medium? At least on slack I can disable notifications or close the app. I can't disable my helicopter boss from buzzing me in person. >It's interesting that in Britain, often hailed as ab example in terms of digitalization, total factor productivity is almost flat for 15 years. What are you talking about? How's productivity are you referring to? Bureaucracy in Britain is massively simpler than in Germany, both for businesses and for citizens.
  - toyg 3y ago
    > pissing away hundreds of millions of taxpayer Euros in the process to politically connected consultancy firms only to end up with a worse result That also happens in the UK, don't worry - except in British Pounds. > Bureaucracy in Britain is massively simpler than in Germany It is. The counterpoint is that fraud is rampant and cronyism is the order of the day. A lot of stuff that in DE/FR/IT would be pursued by law enforcement as corruption is just part and parcel of public life here in UK.
- spandrew 3y ago
  Sorry, but this is not accurate: People messaging over Slack 100% makes us more effective. Like any technology, including printing 20 pages of status report, there are ways to be efficient with them, and ways to be inefficient with them. The workforce right now are growing up as digital natives. Time to act like it.
  - droopyEyelids 3y ago
    The concept you're missing is that a barrier to communication, like sending the fax, forces one to organize their thoughts before impinging on another person's time. So while digital communication has a lower round trip time, it also has a lower barrier to entry, which means you get more communications and they're less focused. This leads to situations like my inbox, with 50 messages a day that are parts of huge unfocused threads and it can take 5 minutes of diligent effort to find out if my attention is even required, and at that point my 'action' will probably be to reply to the thread asking for clarification, setting off the same bullshit task for all the people CC'ed
    - an_aparallel 3y ago
      wonder if this is an opportunity for some enterprising individual to sell llm powered "idea distillation before hitting send" (as a service)...that was intended as a joke...but i can see it being great hahaha.
    - whatisyour 3y ago
      When has increased barrier to communication ever been good? It's better to reduce barrier and change training rather increase barrier as a punishment.
      - hotnfresh 3y ago
        > When has increased barrier to communication ever been good? Phone call costs used to mean you probably wanted to answer every phone call you received, rather than missing calls you should have answered because you're so used to ignoring them since most are spam and fraud. IDK about good in terms of humanity or whatever, but if I could snap my fingers and set a $0.05/minute rate on all phone calls, and $0.15 for long distance connections of any kind, I'd do it, because it'd be a net-improvement for everyone I know. > It's better to reduce barrier and change training rather increase barrier The medium is the message. You want to change the message, look at the medium, not the people.
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  Hard agree. Seen too much shit like Kanban boards suddenly sucking because they’re digital and limitless instead of physical and limited in size, or schools sending avalanches of mostly-useless email and other digital messages home where before you’d just have gotten a handful of paper notes in the mail or sent home with kids.
- irrational 3y ago
  Wait, hold up. Are you saying that anytime you need to ask a coworker, or maybe someone one a different team, a question you send a fax instead of slacking them? Do you all have fax machines in your homes?
- syntheweave 3y ago
  It's similar to issues encountered with previous eras of industrialization: when you have a factory, you can make a lot of one thing. So you reshape society around that thing, and now one size fits all, even if it doesn't. The thing digitalization solved was the paperwork bottleneck(access to raw data), not the information bottleneck(what people need to know to do their jobs). We have a surplus of global firehose information systems, but a scarcity of useful filtering mechanisms, most of them based on traditional indexing(date/time, alphabet, keyword search) or a black box algorithm that usually isn't tuned for your scenario. As well, there are a lot of unaddressed problems with data custody, where access controls tend to be very all-or-nothing and bespoken, and aren't generalized to the whole operating system.
tidwall 3y ago
Japan is geographically larger than Germany. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
- ericpauley 3y ago
  Germany is part of the European Union, which is 10x larger than Japan and a sixth of world GDP.
  - deepsun 3y ago
    Why sixth? EU's GDP is #2 (nominal) lagging very slightly to US [1], or #3 by PPP. Germany's GDP is #3 (nominal) or #5 (PPP) [2]. [1] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPSH@WEO/EU/CHN/USA https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPSH@WEO/EU/CHN/USA [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Germany UPDATE: fixed the statement, previous was about world trade share.
    - aidenn0 3y ago
      Not #6 but "a sixth" as in 1/6 of the total GDP of the world.
    - hollerith 3y ago
      >EU's GDP is #2, greatly surpassing US Your link [1] shows that the EU surpasses US in international trade, not in GDP.
      - deepsun 3y ago
        Yep, fixed (you're too fast! :). Although the statement still holds, but it's "slightly" not "greatly" now.
    - AlchemistCamp 3y ago
      Not quite sure what you're getting at, but that claim is not true. The US economy was roughly comparable in size to the EU's 15 years ago but is now nearly 1/3 larger than the EU + UK, or about 1/2 larger than the EU without the UK: https://www.ft.com/content/80ace07f-3acb-40cb-9960-8bb4a44fd8d9 https://www.ft.com/content/80ace07f-3acb-40cb-9960-8bb4a44fd...
gumballindie 3y ago
> Being part of an entire continent and a monetary union, instead of tiny isolated island definitely works in favor of Germany. Controling said continent and ensuring policy is tilted in your favour tends to help. Bonus points if your resources are supplied by dictatorial regimes that start wars with or threaten your neighbours keeping them docile.

lispm 3y ago

Productivity: GDP per hour worked, 2022, OECD. Japan 53.2 USD Germany 88 USD

0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
Isn’t that heavily skewed by Japan’s culture of being in the office for obscenely long stretches? Not that they necessarily have to be productive, but the expectation is to be present.
- pizzalife 3y ago
  Yes. If they didn't have to spend every waking hour at work, things like raising a family would be conceivable. Everything is connected and that's part of the reason why Japan's population pyramid is a disaster.
- MandieD 3y ago
  And German office culture is even less presentee-ist than American. Unless you have a relatively high salary, you have a 35-40 hour contract full time, with a lot of us on part time contracts. Pre-Covid, we really were only around for those set hours, with a few flextime accumulated here and there, then burned off within the year. Even with home office, people still tend to stick to their contract hours. Your employer would be a bit suspicious if you were routinely in the office or logged into the VPN longer than you were booking…
TulliusCicero 3y ago
Yes, though the yen being real weak also affects this.

swyx 3y ago

the fact that Japan has wallowed in the backwaters since the 1980s is endlessly fascinating to me. Can't think of another country that had so much potential just voluntarily squander it away because of.. bad culture?

permo-w 3y ago
wallowed in the backwaters is a bit strong. it's still the world's 3rd/4th largest economy with the 12th largest population
- swyx 3y ago
  yea i knkow... i struggled to describe the feelings i had about japan, this is the best i had lol. open to suggestions. but primarily thinking of: - nikkei/real estate not past its dotcom peak - telecoms/internet infra generally 1 generation behind most other developed countries - anecdotally seemingly very hostile/unstable politics especially to women and immigrants - i vaguely remember some revisionist history around their ww2 atrocities?
  - permo-w 3y ago
    absolutely booming culturally though. food, tv, comic books, video games, trading cards all extremely popular the world over, which cannot be said for any other nation besides the US, which is almost 3x the size and hasn't earned that position on merit the same way Japan has
  - throwawaymaths 3y ago
    How about Rested on the laurels of its postwar boom?
  - mitthrowaway2 3y ago
    IMO, the lower the real estate valuations, the better. Cheap real estate is one of the main points Japan has in its favor right now. Cheap transportation, cheap food, and cheap electricity all contribute to a healthy economy; cheap real estate is no different. On the telecom side, as with so many others, Japan squandered their early lead by being extremely inward-focused, as usual. Despite their export-oriented economy and a few giants like Toyota and Sony, most Japanese companies are rarely interested in looking beyond their (shrinking) domestic market, resulting in "Galapagos syndrome", where diverse and sophisticated domestic technologies evolve in isolation from the rest of the world, only to eventually be crushed when global competitors catch up and subsequently pass them.

Axsuul 3y ago

When will California eclipse Japan then?

civilitty 3y ago
Germany broke $2 trillion GDP around 2002, so it took about 20 years to overcome Japan. California broke $2T GDP around 2011 so it'll probably take another decade for California to overcome Japan.
TulliusCicero 3y ago
If the yen gets even weaker, it could happen real soon!

simonebrunozzi 3y ago

Fun fact, for a brief moment Italy was the world's 4th largest economy (after USA, Japan and Germany) in the 1980s. 1987: US $4,855B Japan $2,532B Germany $1,298B Italy $805B UK $745B

darknavi 3y ago
Why? What caused the boon at the time?
- valzam 3y ago
  I mean it's still the 8th biggest economy in the world, so not exactly small. People always find this very surprising giving all the issues the country has but the north has many centuries of high-end manufacturing history. In particular very expensive, very specialised machines used in manufacturing of everything else.
- kulahan 3y ago
  really good pasta harvest
- toyg 3y ago
  The industrial sector was riding the long wave of public investment started with the Marshall Plan. The Socialist Party was brought into government in the early 1960s (to lock out the larger Communist Party), and ensured the robust program of public funding for industrial efforts (and civil servants) would continue and expand. This created a feedback loop whereby public debt would grow, forcing currency devaluation, which boosted exports, which made the system look so successful that further increasing public debt was seen as acceptable - and so on and so forth. In addition, a few underdeveloped regions exploited the deflated exchange rates to bootstrap cheap manufacturing, particularly in the North-East, right about that time. The game came crashing down in the early '90s, when credit markets pulled the plug as the debt/gdp ratio hit triple digits and looked out of control. The only way to re-establish credibility was to dramatically cut spending and increase taxes (infamously, one year the government made an overnight withdrawal from all private bank accounts over a certain balance, completely unannounced!) and hook Italian fortunes to the European integration effort, piggybacking on the almighty Deutschemark. This stabilised things but effectively ended the boom times for good, since we cannot compete at the cheap end anymore. Still, the country continues to be a solid G8 member and produces a lot of excellent fare - the world queues up to buy Italian brands, from automotive to food, and most of them are absolutely worth the money. Among other things, chances are that your sunglasses and eyeglasses are made in Italy, even if you don't know it.

xutopia 3y ago

Germany is also allowing lots of immigration and this helps their economy by having an available workforce.

ruiisnwn 3y ago
The citizens will have no claim on any national divident or claim of ownership. Whats the point if they have no borders and no country.

grahamgooch 3y ago

In ten years it won’t matter. The top 3 in the world will be USA, China and India. Then it will become China, india and USA. Unless Germany and Japan change their birth rates they will start shrinking https://www.indiatoday.in/business/story/india-to-surpass-germany-and-japan-to-become-world-third-largest-economy-by-2023-sp-global-survey-2453053-2023-10-24 https://www.indiatoday.in/business/story/india-to-surpass-ge...

api 3y ago
China's birth rate is much lower than the US, but both are below replacement. US is only slightly below. India is slightly above, but falling. IMHO the countries to dominate the 21st century will be those that attract the largest number of high quality immigrants. Countries that do not will stagnate. Countries that drive quality people away (brain drain) will collapse. The US has an huge advantage there unless we stupidly close our borders because of racism and fear. China will fare poorly if rising authoritarianism and low birth rates lead to both declining population and population loss. Nobody migrates to authoritarian countries unless they have nowhere better to go and are fleeing something a lot worse.