Band 58, Heft 1 - Industriepolitik in Westeuropa seit den 1960er Jahren / Industrial Policy in Western Europe since the 1960s editors: Ralf Ahrens, Astrid M. Eckert, Dieter Ziegler

As the Institute for Economic History at the GDR Academy of Science was being wound up following German reunion, the existence of the Economic History Yearbook was also threatened. Initially, its publication was only guaranteed for 1991, so in the early nineties the question was pertinent whether the Yearbook could be continued in a new form or whether it would be wound up too. As we know today, the Yearbook survived the “Wende” but with a new editorial and advisory board and a new concept. To mark the 25 th anniversary of the new “Yearbook”, the editors called upon Toni Pierenkemper – as both first and long-standing Managing Editor – to provide his perspective on the situation in which the Yearbook was relaunched. The following insights are essentially based on his correspondence as managing editor today archived in Bochum.

Historical research on industrial policy has only recently begun to focus on the crisis-shaken decades of the 1970s and 1980s, demonstrating the broadness of the topic as well as the need for further research. In the first section of this introduction, we address the challenges in arriving at a definition of industrial policy that would encompass the wide variety of this type of state intervention into economic structures. In a second step, we provide a short survey of the variations of industrial policy in Western market economies since the 1960s, emphasizing the plurality of goals and methods that make this topic such a promising avenue of historical research. Finally, we suggest some perspectives for future research, including its potential for interdisciplinary connections.

This article examines the change in the fundamental assumptions underpinning industrial policy from the mid-1970s in Britain. It necessarily contrasts the broadly supply-side concerns of industrial policy from the mid-1970s with the more demand-side concerns of the earlier ‘Golden Age’ period from 1945. Where in the earlier period the emphasis in industrial policy was on capital investment and the role of government in compensating for perceived market inefficiency, from the late 1970s this emphasis shifted to the need to improve the flexibility and quality of supply-side factors allied to a more optimistic view of the ability of the market to secure efficient outcomes.

After the end of the postwar reconstruction boom, the decline of traditional large-scale industries and intensified international competition increased the demand for state aid in the Federal Republic of Germany. This article discusses the relevance of overall industrial policy concepts for the utilization of subsidies from the 1960s to the 1980s. Concentrating on the federal level, it delineates the development of industrial subsidies in relation to the financial support of other sectors and identifies the main benefitting industries. Then the focus turns to attempts to professionalize reporting on subsidies and ideas on the “scientization” of industrial policy, the disillusionment with these instruments, and debates about subsidy cuts. Overall it becomes clear that the extent and composition of federal subsidies were not the result of a coherent policy.

The article analyses Italian regional developmental policies between the 1950s and 1990s. It focuses in particular on the intervention through state-owned enterprises and public agencies in the underdeveloped southern regions known as the Mezzogiorno. Analysing the flow of investments in these regions, the article assesses the targets and the results of the so-called “extraordinary intervention,” advancing some hypotheses about the causes of its long-term failure: the lack of planning, the preference for top-down actions, and the peculiar institutional framework. The article also evaluates the long-term effects of this failure on the Italian industrial structure.

This article focuses on one of the most persistent regional aid programmes in West German history, the so-called “zonal borderland aid” ( Zonenrandförderung ). The programme supported regions along the 1,393-kilometer long inter-German border that divided West and East Germany during the Cold War. The article seeks to explain the increasingly fraught relationship between borderland aid and European state aid control in the 1970s and 1980s. The intervention of the Directorate for Competition (DG IV) against borderland aid begs an explanation since the Treaty of Rome (1957) had granted a specific exemption for aid to these regions from the competition policies of the Common Market. The article makes the general case that regional state aid is a key component of structural policy alongside sectoral aid. It argues that interest politics prevented a sober needs assessment of the West German border regions, turning Zonenrandförderung into funding by habit, not by need. This left the European Commission as the only institution that could mount a credible challenge to an ossified sense of entitlement in the affected regions.

From 1977 to 1984, an ambitious European industrial policy was implemented by the European Economic Community for the first and only time in its history. It dealt with the crisis of the steel sector. This paper strives to understand why member states chose this solution, despite the fact that some of them were hostile to the devolution of power to supranational institutions, as for example Britain or France. The most reluctant state was Germany, whose officials usually associated any attempts of EEC-wide industrial policy with dirigism. The paper, based on archives of three governments (Germany, France, the United Kingdom) and of the European Commission, argues that the European solution was best for member states, and in particular for Germany, in order to control their neighbours and avoid a costly subsidy race.

Due to the decline of the Western European textile industry in the 1960s and international economic turbulences in the 1970s, the chemical fibre industry in Western Europe ran into trouble. The ten largest manufacturers of polyester fibres therefore applied for a structural crisis cartel in 1972. Even though the European Commission rejected the request, the question of a cartel agreement remained a topic of discussion at the European level for more than ten years. In June 1978, eleven European manufacturers of chemical fibres signed a cartel agreement in Brussels, but it was not compatible with the Treaty of the European Economic Community. It was not until 1980 that the companies submitted a new contract to the European Commission which was in accordance with antitrust law and renewed in 1982. The article analyses the course of negotiations as well as the driving forces and different aims of political and industrial players on the national and the European level.

During the German occupation of Norway 1940-45, Göring launched a large-scale plan for a massive expansion of the Norwegian light metal industry in order to boost aircraft production for the Luftwaffe. This light metal project developed into the largest economic project in occupied Norway. A case study of the activities of the Norwegian enterprises, investors and industrialists who were involved in the light metal project sheds new light on the economic relations between German and Norwegian actors in occupied Norway. Dominant assumptions of the German occupational regime as a hegemonic force of exploitation, and the light metal project as a solely German initiative are put to question. However, the analysis of the Norwegian actors in the light metal project reveals that Norwegian participants had a leeway of manoeuvre, which they sought to utilize. The activity of Norwegian enterprises, investors and industrialists was characterized not mainly by anxiety or adjustment, but was rather marked by close cooperation with the occupational forces. The German occupation resulted in manifold business opportunities, und the urge for cooperation must be explained by competitive and commercial interests, and economic pragmatism rather than political and ideological motives.

The United Nations’ Human Development Index (HDI) has become an important tool for measuring and comparing living standards between countries and regions. However, the HDI has also attracted a fair share of conceptual criticism. Starting from Andrea Wagner’s historical estimations of a HDI for Germany in the interwar and early postwar period, we take up part of that criticism by implementing three essential modifications to the mode of calculation. We test how far they alter our picture of the relative living standard in the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the Federal Republic of Germany. First, we replace the arithmetic mean by the geometric mean, which is said to solve the problem of perfect substitutability; second, we extend the HDI by an additional fourth dimension measuring economic and political freedom – an important, though neglected, dimension; and third, as the perhaps most crucial conceptual intervention, we develop weighting schemes for the partial indices that are theoretically backed by happiness economic research. Thus, we challenge the common, but arbitrary fundamental assumption that all partial indices receive equal weights. Our results show that the HDI for Germany reacts very sensitively to conceptual interventions, making it difficult to use it for the intertemporal and international comparison of living standards. We also find that the proposed modified HDIs allow for a re-evaluation of the living standard in interwar Germany; and in contrast to what the reference estimations on the HDI for Germany say, there is a profound discontinuity between the Third Reich and post-war Germany in terms of living standards.

This article investigates one stage in the career of Dr. Wilhelm Voss (1896-1974) who was a chartered accountant, manager of the Reichswerke “Hermann Göring” and armament adviser to the Egyptian government after World War II. During the Weimar republic Voss was a respected association official and chartered accountant without a political background. Between spring 1933 and autumn 1934 he integrated himself fast and successfully into the Nazi regime. The article explores Voss’ actions, his motives and family background as well as professional points of contact to National Socialism. At the same time it reveals the difficult development of chartered accountancy as a profession in Germany around 1930 and attempts to professionalize the occupation by different individuals and organisations. This paper takes up new research approaches to the history of elites. The source material is evaluated on the four analysis levels of “authority”, “situation”, “profession” and “self-image”.