The German Economy and East-Central Europe: The Development of Intra-Industry Trade from Ostpolitik to the Present
in German Politics and Society
Over the past decade Germany has had one of the most successful
economies in the developed world. Despite the ongoing Euro crisis unemployment
has fallen below 7 percent, reaching its lowest levels since German
reunification in 1990. Germany’s youth unemployment is among the
lowest in Europe, far beneath the European average.1 One of the most
important engines of the German economy today, and in fact throughout
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, has been its export sector. As Ludwig
Erhard, West Germany’s Economics Minister during the Wirtschaftswunder
of the 1950s remarked: “foreign trade is quite simply the core and
premise of our economic and social order.”2 According to various estimates,
today exports and imports of goods and services account for nearly a half of
German GDP—up from only a quarter in 1990. Germany is one of only three
economies that do over a trillion dollars worth of exports a year, the other
two being the United States and China.