ZEW President Franz Presents Strategy Paper – On the Road to Increased Growth and Employment in Germany

Germany is facing immense problems, especially with regard to the current misery in the labour market. The government that will be formed after the coming Bundestag elections will have to tackle these challenges with great courage to make sure that Germany stays an ideal place to do business in the future.

According to the President of the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) in Mannheim, Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Wolfgang Franz, occasional reform steps here and there will not suffice. Germany needs a reform package to get back onto the road to increased growth and employment. Franz reckons that reforms to corporate taxation and social security systems, more flexibility on the labour market as well as the consolidation of public households constitute important key aspects of such a reform package.

In his guideline for the 2005 Bundestag elections, Franz analyses Germany's key issues and presents promising approaches to finding the correspondent solutions. He rejects exaggerated pessimism since, according to him, Germany has shown its remarkable economic capabilities more than once. Defeatism and despondency must not prevent people from seeing positive perspectives for all the problems.