Volume 226, Issue 3

In this paper we perform a comparative study of the forecasting properties of the about 30 alternative leading indicators for Germany using the growth rates of German real GDP. In addition to them, we have constructed a diffusion index based on the principal component analysis and including 145 component series that reflect all the facets of German economy. We use the post-unification data which cover years from 1991 through 2004. Using a battery of statistical tests we detect a structural break in the growth rates that occurs in the first half of 2001. Our results suggest that the forecasting ability of the leading indicators has been rather good in the pre-break period with our diffusion index showing the superior forecasting accuracy but the forecasting performance of all alternative indicators has significantly deteriorated in the post-break period, i.e. in 2001-2004. None of the leading indicator models was able to predict and accommodate the structural break in the growth rates of the time series under scrutiny. This finding confirms the widespread impression among the practitioners that the state of German economy in the recent years became much more difficult to forecast.

The computer revolution together with educational expansion has led to dramatic changes in the structure of the workforce and in the organisation of workplaces in the last four decades. These developments should have different impacts on the use of vocational and general skills. This study compares depreciation rates of general and specific training capital among West German workers between 1979 and 1999. In this time the personal computer entered the workplaces and the share of workers with a university degree doubled. Econometric estimates based on respondent’s subjective ratings of the share of training skills applied to the current job indicate that depreciation rates of vocational skills increased significantly. In contrast, there is no evidence for positive depreciation rates among university graduates with general training capital at all. The role of measurement errors in respondent’s ratings for the estimated depreciation rates is analysed with sensitivity tests. The findings lend some support to the view that there is obsolescence of vocational skills in times of rapid technological change and educational expansion.

The paper empirically analyses the impact on individual municipalities of replacing the German local business tax by a local surcharge on income and corporation tax. The microsimulation models used for this and refined for the present paper originate in calculations carried out for the Federal Ministry of Finance in cooperation between the Federal Statistical Office and the Humboldt University in Berlin. The data basis is formed by the roughly 30 million individual data sets of the most up-to-date income and local business tax statistics provided by the Federal Statistical Office. A local surcharge tax which, like the BDI/VCI model analysed, assigns tax revenue incurred on profits to the municipality of permanent establishment and that on other income to the domicile municipality, affects the revenue situation of the municipalities in highly differing ways. The losers in such a local tax reform include those municipalities in which an above-average number of industrial and commercial enterprises are resident. These are the “core towns” of the Old Federal Laender in particular. By contrast, the revenue situation of the surrounding municipalities and of the municipalities with a rural character would considerably improve on average. However, the core towns in the New Federal Laender which are currently tax-weak because they have little industry would also improve their revenue situation in most cases by applying a surcharge tax. In order to maintain the financial status quo, the core towns in the Old Federal Laender in particular would have to levy relatively high local tax rates, whilst the surrounding municipalities would be able to become more attractive by applying tax rates which as a rule would be much lower. The consequence of this would be that highincome earners in the core towns would have a not inconsiderable incentive to change their place of residence for tax purposes, which would further worsen the financial situation of the core towns.

The traditional Gross Domestic Product (GDP) reflects the money value of the annual economic output produced by the domestic industries’ employees. Thus, the GDP fully accounts for paid work. In contrast, unpaid work remains unconsidered. However, measured in time units, unpaid work clearly exceeds paid work. Therefore, societies rely likewise on paid and unpaid work. The study at hand identifies women’s and men’s volume of paid and unpaid work in time units and money values. For this purpose, German time use data are combined with the traditional monetary input-output table (IOT) for the year 2000 and its inverse matrix. While the IOT provides information about the industries’ direct and indirect contributions to traditional GDP, time use data determine the gender-specific paid and unpaid workload. Thus, women’s and men’s share in an extended GDP, defined as the sum of traditional GDP and household production, can be given. Finally the genders’ level of qualification is taken into account. This, in turn, allows for a more precise identification of the gender-specific quality of work.

Kristof Dascher’s (2005) hypothesis that the level of vacant accommodation in eastern Germany can be mitigated by lowering housing rents can be countered by an argument based on alternative, but market-oriented costs from the housing economy, which postulates that from the owners’ point of view the alternatives of demolition, vacancy or rental can be optimal depending on the situation. However, if the gross rent level is reduced by 20% the reservation rent level is reached where owners become indifferent between rental and vacancy. In view of the low elasticities in housing demand, such rent reductions are far from sufficient to eradicate vacancies.

This is a short note on two potential worries surrounding a scenario of falling rents in East Germany. These worries, put forward by Wolfgang Maennig, are: (1) that housing suppliers could withdraw as rents fall, while (2) housing demanders might hesitate to expand consumption as rents fall. - This note insists that falling rents’ overall benefits would outweigh their costs.