How Many Jobs Did the US Troop Withdrawal Cost?

Following the end of the Cold War, the US withdrew around 200,000 soldiers from Germany within a few years. A joint study by ZEW Mannheim and the University of Cologne shows that this had significant and long-term economic consequences for the regions affected. For every US soldier withdrawn, half a full-time job was lost in the vicinity of the respective base. Regional businesses and local authority budgets were also severely affected. The podcast is available on all popular podcast platforms, such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Deezer, as well as on the ZEW website.

In the new ZEW podcast “Wirklich Wirtschaft”, the study’s authors, Jakob Schmidhäuser and Johannes Kochems, discuss the consequences for employment, wages and public finances, as well as the lessons to be learnt for the recently announced reduction in US troops in Germany.